Deleted SharePoint sites News/Following still appearing

Question

Under following on my SharePoint homepage, there are a number of starred deleted sites that will not go away. I will unfollow, and they just keep coming back. Additionally, news from sites that have been deleted will not go away.

Answer 1

Hi @Breanne Neudorf ,

The deleted site will not disappear immediately from the SharePoint Home Page (Following site list). However, after several days or weeks, it will automatically disappear.

If you want to immediately clear it from the page, you can follow the steps below to see the result:

1.   Ensure that SharePoint Online Management Shell is installed

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588

2.   Run SharePoint Online Management Shell as administrator

3.   Connect to the tenant

Connect-SPOService (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161392.aspx)

4.   Release the hold for the group site

Set-SPOSite -LockState UnLock (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161394.aspx)

6.   Delete the site

Remove-SPOSite (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161377.aspx) 

After the above steps are finished, please wait for 24 hours to see the result.

Regarding "Deleted SharePoint sites News still appearing", check out this thread:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sharepoint/sharepoint-news-post-still-appears-even-after-the-news-page-has/m-p/3291532

News pages should not be deleted as this doesn't remove them from the news web part.  You can use SharePoint JSON formatting to demote news pages in SharePoint .

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