Whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s likely that your site has outdated content that is no longer serving your law firm. That includes content that doesn’t reflect your law firm’s current status or latest successes or ideas in old blog posts or practice area pages. You and your firm never stop changing, but this old content will still appear in search results and misrepresent you, your current news, or your knowledge.
It’s time to do something about it. With the new “Removals Tool” in the Google Search Console, the general public and website owners now have the ability to identify and temporarily remove outdated content from search results until you have updated the page to reflect a more accurate reality.
What does this mean for your law firm’s website? It means you have more control over what content from your site appears in search results. More specifically, it means you can:
• See what content has been flagged as outdated by third parties
• Temporarily remove outdated content that you don’t want users to find. You have about 6 months to change it.
• Know what content is being filtered as adult content by SafeSearch filters.
Use this feature to crowdsource the discovery of outdated content. Your audience is now a support system that can notify you about what should be changed. This is an opportunity to update and improve your content which will ultimately help boost your law firm’s SEO which means more leads.
Permanent removal of a URL should not be your first course of action. If a page is getting top placement, it would be best to update it and add new information rather than remove it. A permanent removal should only be considered if something is out of date beyond repair, such as a page pertaining to an event that is never happening again. Still, this page could be updated with a summary of how the event was a success.
This new tool from Google Search Console makes it easy to manage your URLs. With the clear and user-friendly interface, you can make new requests to temporarily remove URLs and clear cached URLs. Doing so will also clear the current snippets that appear under your search result, and new ones will be generated upon the next crawl.
If dealing with these updates seems like too much effort, don’t panic. Custom Legal Marketing stays up to date with Google’s changes, and proactively monitors your site’s content, placement, and links. We can help you respond to flagged content and guide you toward changes that reflect your real-time knowledge, skillset, experience, and values. With us, your law firm won’t get stuck in the past.
Cristina Fríes is a MA in English/Creative Writing from UC Davis (2019), and is a legal marketing strategist and content developer for CLM. Her interests include creating compelling marketing content, writing books, and traveling the world.