Remove your Facebook profile from search engines

Today we speak about your Facebook profile and its publicity, and more specifically its inclusion on Google and other search engines.

So, after all the hesitation, your friends convinced you to create your Facebook profile; you subscribed to the service, you inserted some of your personal data (the minimum necessary, I hope), you  added some friend, and you played with some web-application …
Time goes by, you start to be confident with it and you think that your profile is just a page only your friends look at … until you “accidentally” look for your name on the search engines and here it is your Facebook profile on the first positions.
What do you do? Do you care about it? Don’t you? Not to worry, it is not too difficult to gain back (at least part of) your privacy (other than deleting your Facebook profile):

  1. Log in to your Facebook account;
  2. Go to “Settings” – “Privacy Settings”;
  3. Go to “Search”;
  4. Deselect the last setting: “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”;
  5. Click “Save Changes”;

You are done … but with a catch: on the immediate, this procedure just prevent Facebook to keep submiting your profile to the search engines every time it is updated, but in order to be really unlisted you have to wait some week if not months … probably it is still not very good, but better than nothing. 🙂

Marco Di Fresco