As soon as you make your Hub live and available to the public, it will become searchable by Google. Often that's a good thing — but sometimes you want just the opposite! If you didn't set the No Robots Meta Tag before going public and your Hub is already appearing on Google, you can request that it be removed. Here's how.
Verify site ownership
Before you can make a request to remove your website from Google, you'll first have to prove that you actually own the site. In this context, "the site" refers to the domain on which your Hub is hosted, whether that's a custom domain, or the default co-branded Uberflip domain. To do that, you need to follow Google's process for verifying ownership of your custom domain. This consists of two steps:
- Add your Hub's domain as its own property on Google Search Console
- Verify your ownership of the domain with Google using one of their verification methods.
Google describes how to do these things in their Search Console documentation, here:
Once you have verified your ownership of the custom domain, you can ask Google to remove it from their search results with the Remove URLs Tool.
Request site removal from Google results
Google allows you to remove your Hub's domain from their search results using the Remove URLs Tool. They describe how to do that in this article:
Note that this is temporary, because Google is actually just removing your Hub's domain from its search results until it reindexes your Hub at some point in the future. This means that you'll need to take additional steps to make the removal permanent. Google describes a few different options on how to do that in the article linked above (see here). One thing you should do on the Uberflip side is set the No Robots Meta Tag, which is described in this article.