Question

We want to remove a content sensitive PDF from Google's Search cache. We used Google's Webpage removal request tool, submitted the Url, and received a "Removed" status several hours later. Several days later, the PDF still appears in Google searches. The file is no longer there, robots.txt is blocking it from being indexed, but the "View as HTML" link in the Google search still displays all the text from the original PDF. We have been waiting for several days now. Any ideas why this does not work? Thanks.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Answer 1

I don't see a link to purge google's cache, but I see a dead link submission, perhaps since you had moved the file you could submit it as a dead link and that may trigger a purge.

Also, I forgot how, but you could request google crawl your site again. This will advanced your site in the crawlers schedule so it will check your site sooner. When it does, I read on google's site the old cache will be purge.

Before you begin, the page owner must have done one of the following:

To update the cached version of a page, change the content of the page. The next time Google crawls the page, we'll update the cached version.
To remove cached versions of a page from Google's index and prevent Google from caching the page in the future, you must add a noarchive meta tag to that page. The next time we crawl that site, we'll see the tag and remove the page.

Hope this helps.