Can you delete all my posts and make this old site not indexable

  • mrblacksheep · Member ·

    Hello, I am writing about an old wordpress.com blog that I have not used for years. It’s been set to private for a while now in case I wanted to restart it but am too busy to continue with it. I want to delete all my content and eventually the entire account, but lets start with the content.

    Also, I want to have the screen captures from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine removed since they did that without any permission from me. I have started looking into how to do that and it looks like some code editing is required… https://www.usefulblogging.com/wordpress-robots-txt-file/

    Here’s another take on the steps to do this https://blog.imincomelab.com/remove-site-wayback-machine-archive/

    Maybe you have a better way of dealing with that. If these techniques wont work with a wordpress.com site is there a plugin I can pay for, or some existing settings I can adjust myself?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, since your site at unaffiliatedparty.wordpress.com is now set to Private, search engines will no longer be able to index it as that setting changes your site’s Robots.txt to disallow crawling. This is what your site’s current Robots.txt looks like: 

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /

    Google and other search sites will eventually stop crawling and remove your site from their caches, but WordPressdotcom has no control over when that will happen and it can take from 4-6 weeks since you changed that setting.

    It looks like requests for earlier removal from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine should be sent to infoATarchive.org (as per this public thread on Internet Archive) but it should also eventually respond to the changed Robots.txt now on your site.

    Again, removal of your content from 3rd party services is not something that WordPressdotcom has any control over.

    Although this is not strictly needed since no one has access to your Private site, if you still wish to empty the content of your Private site, you can follow this support guide to emptying your site: https://en.support.wordpress.com/empty-site/

    If in the future you want to make your site visible to human traffic, you might consider the “Hidden” option in Privacy settings. https://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/

    Hope that helps.

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