Treat deleted entries consistently to allow deletion of abusive comments

[quinterius]

Title
Treat deleted entries consistently to allow deletion of abusive comments

Short, concise description of the idea
If an entry does not exist, then the LiveJournal server should ALWAYS give an Error 404. Else, abusive comments are cached permanently in Google.

Full description of the ideaCurrently, if the LiveJournal server is requested to display

Comments

[mooism]

I agree that LJ should give a 404 error for these pages.

But I don't think it will fix your problem. If Google has revisited the page, it should be caching the new page, not the old page. I think Google has not revisited the page and that is why it still has the old page in its cache. If LJ was giving out a 404 response, Google would not see it because Google is not asking for the page again.

If there is Error 404 then one can request removal to Google

[quinterius]

If the file indeed does not exist, then one can request the removal of the cache entry using the Google page removal tool. In this case, Google will discover automatically that the page does not exist and the request should be granted (hopefully). I have requested such a removal. It was denied since the page still exists as far as Google is concerned. My request for removal due to objectionable content is much more difficult since I don't know what criteria Google uses and whether human judgment is involved. It might be that they just have a list of forbidden words, which is not the case in question.

Google Search Cache Removal Requests

[quinterius]

After a long delay, I have an update on my original request. Actually, it is not longer necessary since I succeeded in having Google remove the offensive entry from their blog search cache database. A key point is that there are actually two databases, one for regular searches and one for blog searches