Remember: How to delete a Crawled Property

Deleting a crawled property from SharePoint is easy but sometimes requires a little preparation.

Summary | This post shows how to delete a crawled property and how to prepare it.

Deleting a crawled property might be necessary if

• you are developing a custom indexing connector and are still testing it; obsolete properties will accumulate over time
• your BDC changes from time to time and every change leads to new crawled properties being created with the next full crawl
• $otherReason 

The list of all crawled properties can be found at Central Administration -> Search Service Application -> Queries and Results -> Metadata Properties -> Crawled Properties.

Deleting unused crawled properties

In SharePoint 2010 deleting a single crawled property is not possible. But you can delete all unused crawled properties of a category.

Go to Metadata Properties and click Categories:

In the context menu of a category click Edit Category:

Check the option Delete all unmapped crawled properties and click OK:

All unused crawled properties should be gone after clicking OK. But if the one you want to delete is still present then the next chapter is for you to read.

Unmapping and unindexing 

You have to remove all mappings from the property and you also have to remove it from the search index.

Click Edit/Map Property in the context menu of a crawled property:

The Edit Crawled Property page opens.

Make sure you

• remove all mappings for this property
• do not include values for this property in the search index

Repeat this for all properties which should be deleted when deleting unused properties of its category.

Note: Some OOB SharePoint crawled properties cannot be deleted.