Unsubmitting web pages

[Marcia]

One more time, just to double-check:

Some web sites migrated to a new system, with all new URLs. The old pages no longer exist. I will need to submit each listed page for 404 - not just the index page. Is that correct?

How long should I wait to submit the identical pages with the new URLs?

Thanks,
Marcia

[Machiavelli]

As long as the old pages are giving out a 404, I would start resubmitting immediately.

[Brett_Tabke]

And you can't forward the pages to the new domain Marcia? Either from a java script, meta refresh, or some other type of redirect? Lost access to the old pages?

[Marcia]

The old pages could have had a redirect for a maximum of two weeks if someone hadn't goofed.. The old URLs are now dead, but all being forwarded to a common error page with a link to the new sitebuilder log-on. So all access is lost. However, they are not coming up with 404's.

So far I've submitted the main sitebuilder page, where the site I'm mainly concerned with is one of 5 "featured" sites, hoping that it will be crawled and found independently.

I wrote AV support about it, very specifically, explaining that I wanted to avoid duplicate content, and this is the reply I received:

"If you would like to expedite the search engines finding the changes on your new site, feel free to submit the main URL to our Add-A-Page form. Also feel free to submit the URL that no longer exists, if it gets a 404 error and is in the index it will be dropped.

If you would like to expedite the search engines finding the changes on a page, feel free to submit the main URL to our Add-A-Page form at
[altavista.com...]

You do not need to provide key words or descriptions because we take that off your pages. You can use META tags to control what is indexed."

I'll take a Photoshop screenshot just for old time's sake -the old URL is still what's listed.