Old/deleted assets (documents) are showing in Google search

Publishing help SEO
1

I have a collection list of resources where I add PDFs, some of these PDFs I already replaced with new ones but the old ones keep showing in Google Search. where is it possible to prevent indexing of these assets I can’t find a place to even delete them permanently.

Thanks!

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

There isn’t any direct way to delete these but in theory, Webflow will do garbage cleanup eventually when it realizes that those images are out of date.

If it’s causing problems for you, you can contact support with the URL to have it removed from assets.

I had a similar issue for a medical client who needed to ensure that old content could be removed, or that indexing by Google was prevented on some docs. The only solutions w

  • Store those documents elsewhere ( S3, bunny .net, etc. ) and link to them manually from your CMS items, or
  • Build a reverse proxy that rewrites those PDF links for you to e.g. http://docs.mysite.com/..., and rewrites the content as well. The RP solution generally doesn’t know what’s meant to exist, but because you control docs.mysite.com you can write your own /robots.txt exclusion and prevent those from being indexed at all.

If you want those PDFs to be indexed, but you need to be able to update the content and have that reflected in Google SERPs, that’s a bit more challenging. Both solutions above could be adapted to that, with the first one being the easiest. You’d just pick a filename and stick with it when you update/replace that file.