There are people among us who do not or no longer 100% assume their Facebook profile. Questionable profile photo, memories of too much drinking… Depending on the privacy settings you have set on your account, people who are not your friends, but who find your Facebook profile on Google can learn more or less things about you… and not always the best, which can sometimes be embarrassing, especially professionally!
Don't worry, it's not all over, because there is an option in the meanders of the opaque Facebook settings that allows you to remove your Facebook profile from search engines. With this option, they will no longer index you and therefore no longer show you when someone searches for your name on Google, for example.
So here's how to remove your Facebook profile from search engines
- Log in to Facebook with the account in question
- Go to your account by clicking on your profile picture at the top right
- Click on “Settings and privacy”
- Click on "Settings"
- Then go to “Privacy” to open the Settings page and Facebook Privacy Tools
- At the very bottom, under the heading “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to show a link to your profile?”, click “Edit”
Note: when Facebook talks about “other search engines” it is talking about search engines other than the one integrated into the social network, i.e. Google, Bing, etc.
- Then uncheck the box “Allow search engines outside of Facebook to display your profile”
- And tap “Disable” when the confirmation window opens
That's it, your Facebook profile will no longer be indexed by search engines and should no longer appear in the results when you type in your name. Please note, however, that the change is not instantaneous; it takes a few hours or days for search engines to go through your Facebook profile again to get the information that they should no longer show you in the results.
What You Need to Know Before Deleting Your Facebook Profile from Search Engines
It is important to note that the method described above only removes the link to your Facebook profile from search results of external search engines. This means that your Facebook friends and people logged into Facebook through their account will still be able to find your profile by searching on the social network.
It is also important to note that removing your Facebook profile from search engines will not remove any information or previous posts that have been shared publicly on the social network. This means that information that has been made public on your profile could still be found by search engine users, even if your profile does not appear in search results.
