 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
Google and other search engines will often cache the pages they provide in their search result, to avoid having to look up these pages multiple times and thus slow down searches. For most websites, this doesn't cause any particular problem, as many websites will remain (mostly) unchanged between googlebot runs. Wikipedia, of course, is far more dynamic. On many occasions in the past, a page will be vandalized just before the googlebot caches the page. As a result, searches for that article for the next few weeks (until the next googlebot run) will display context from the vandalized version of the page. On biographies especially, this can be a severe problem leading to legal ramifications.
This page describes how to request Google remedy the problem by removing the vandalized page from their search cache.