An independent Australian journal · Melbourne
The Australian journal of takedowns, de-indexing and digital reputation
After the page is gone
De-indexing, caches, sitelinks, Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews and the Wayback Machine — the places a takedown goes to die, or to live forever.
Photograph: Victorgrigas. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. See all image credits.
A takedown that ignores search is half a job. This hub covers de-indexing versus deletion, Wayback and other archives, caches, sitelinks and Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews and the indexes Australians forget.
Work here after, or in parallel with, the source takedown in platform takedowns. If the only copy left is a data-broker listing, switch to records and brokers.
Google is not the only drawer. Bing still feeds DuckDuckGo, Brave runs its own index, Yandex and leftover Apple Spotlight cards keep serving URLs that a successful Google removal never touched.
Google’s AI Overview is a summary of pages the index can still see. Chatbots add their own training set on top. Neither product unpublished the source, and a thin digital profile is how one old article becomes the whole answer.
A successful Google removal hides a URL. It does not rebuild the rest of the results page. Caches, sitelinks, image thumbs and Knowledge Panels are leftover machinery, and they are why a “removed” search can still look like the old story.
Archive.org is not Google, and a robots.txt file is not a deletion request. Australians who need a capture dropped must write to the Internet Archive as a site owner or, in a narrow set of cases, as the person in the frame — and should not confuse that job with Trove.
Deleting a URL is not the same job as taking it out of Google. A 404, a 410, a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule and a removal form each tell the crawler a different story, and most of those stories leave the blue link standing.