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I cast a reopen vote and put my reasoning in the comments, but nobody else weighed in:

Best way to remove a retired site from google search?

I also brought it up in chat. If this was seen and mods disagree with my reasoning that's fine, but if nobody saw it I just wanted to give it visibility here.

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  • I don't see any issues with discussing if a question is a duplicate or not here on our Meta site - discussions of community behavior or site policies is really what this site is for. The comments on the question, which have since been removed, unfortunately did not contain the full name of the moderator who marked it as a duplicate. Comments need to have the format of @FirstLast (without a space), but those only had the first name so it likely wasn't seen. You can also flag a question if you think it needs moderator attention.
    – dan Mod
    Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 1:18
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    @dan Thanks. I could have sworn that comment mentions match by prefix, but it seems I was mistaken.
    – Maximillian Laumeister Mod
    Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 1:39
  • No problem, thought I'd let you know so you didn't think you were being ignored. The chat room has been fairly quiet lately...I'll try to check it more often though. You can also direct comments to any username who's been in there recently -- mine is obviously pretty simple :-)
    – dan Mod
    Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 2:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Decisions on whether or something is duplicate is usually made mostly on the title of the question. If the question is really not duplicate, the best way to get it re-opened is to edit it and differentiate the title. You would also want to link to the duplicate and explain why the answers to it might not apply. Once a question is edited, it automatically enters the re-open queue and users on the site can vote on whether or not they think it is duplicate.

I'd say that posting in meta asking whether a specific question is duplicate or not is not appropriate. Getting a question into the re-open queue should be a good enough mechanism that we shouldn't need lots of meta questions about individual posts.

That being said, if there is a pattern of questions closed for dubious reasons, meta would absolutely be place to discuss.

So if you want the question re-opened I would edit the title to say:

Remove a site from Google search once it has been retired and shut down

And add a paragraph to the body:

Removing full site from Google index has been discussed as a possible duplicate but the answers there show what to do with a site that still exists. Once the site is shut down, those mechanisms such as robots.txt won't be available.

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  • Apologies if this is not appropriate on meta, this is indeed not the first time I've tried to re-open a question I thought wasn't a dupe. I already edited the title to differentiate it imo, but that's a good idea to edit the body too to make it more visible. As far as dupes bring marked by title, I think it would make more sense to do it by body like SO does, but that's for a different meta question. I'll add something similar to your suggested edits when I'm free later. Thanks!
    – Maximillian Laumeister Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 19:22
  • I'm not saying that the body doesn't matter, but the title is by far the most visible portion of the question. It is the part that appears in the question list and in search. If the title doesn't reflect how unique the question is, it is very easy for a question to get closed as a dupe inappropriately. And it is fine that you brought this up here, it just won't be scalable if our community sees this as the way to get dupes re-opened on a regular basis.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 19:24
  • Now I've re-opened the question from the re-open queue and made the edits I suggested.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 19:28
  • Although "shut down" and "shutting down" is subtly different.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 17:24

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