Writing on your blog is fine, until you then regret your actions.What can be done to clean up your history if you want to get rid of something?

The big danger with the internet is that it is very easy to publish something, very easy for other sites to pick up what you have said and almost impossible to fully retract what you have previously said. If you have posted in anger and then later regretted it, what can you do to dig yourself out of trouble?

Editing your blog post is easy enough and within seconds you can have the offending remark removed, watered down or hidden. But, the problem with blogging is the amount of other sites that pick up on what you are saying.

If your blog is half popular with Google then it might only take seconds between posting your offensive remark and Google picking up the post and caching it. These days new posts can appear in search engine results in minutes of hitting the publish button. This is fine most of the time, but a nuisance if you want it removed.

And with a blog it is not just the post page. Your new post has probably appeared on its own page, the home page, relevant category and tag pages and archive pages. If the search engines have visited these pages then, apart from the home page, it might be days or weeks before the same search engine comes back and updates the blog post to your corrected version.

So how can you hide your tracks? Well the first thing is to go to Google and sign up for a webmasters’ account and then claim your blog within the account. You can then request Google to remove the post, archive, category and tag pages from their listings. However, this can be a permanent removal that will last some time, so you do not really want to use this tactic on your home page as your blog might drop from search engine listings for a while.

The next step therefore is, after removing what you want to hide, posting another new post about anything that you like. Hopefully the effect of this pinging Google will make the search engine come visiting and it will refresh the cache of the home page, problem sorted!

However, even once you have repeated the above for any other search engines that picked up the post you are not finished. You now need to search for any blog aggregator websites that have also already been on your website. The best way to find these is to search for sites where the problem post and a couple of other recent posts are shown, You then need to contact the owners of these sites and ask them to remove your post.

But there is no reason to say that they will oblige, which means you could still end up with the post displayed on other websites. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to think before you publish. If you are having a rant, write today and publish tomorrow. Give yourself the time to change your mind before your comments spread.

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