Webdetective - 1:54 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

What if a site once had known violations Ie: doorway pages, that put it at risk of getting banned from Google or Yahoo, but it wasn't, however those pages are still in the search engine's index long after the offending pages were removed?

If I removed all offending pages, and have a 404 redirect back to my homepage, should the search engine eventually remove the missing pages from it's index without penalizing the site for violations that have been long ago removed?