Last week, Google started honoring “right to be forgotten” requests in search results, showing the following notice on search results pages for some name searches:
Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more
Now, reports are coming out indicating that webmasters are getting “right to be forgotten” notices in Webmaster Tools. Alex Graves at David Naylor writes:
Arriving into the office this morning we have seen as many as five instances across a number of clients that have received messages through the Webmaster Tools platform, informing them of specific URLs that Google are “no longer able to show”, pointing out that rather than a full removal the pages will be simply omitted from “certain searches on European versions of Google”.
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URLs that are affected within the notifications seem to vary, the majority seeming to be profile related content while others seem to be focused towards user uploaded content.
Barry Schwartz from RustyBrick has also seen some notices in WMT. He shares a screenshot of one, which reads:
Notice of removal from Google Search
We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google…
It then lists the affected links.
Others have also noted receiving such notices:
Webmaster Tools Notice of removal from Google Search http://t.co/mUxPq0Vvof by @luckyboost cc @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/q3ZNnmqTp8
— Menachem Rosenbaum (@luckyboost) July 2, 2014
This could start getting fun for Webmasters as more and more requests are submitted. Google got 12,000 of them before it even launched the actual request tool.
Image via Google