Unsubmitting webpages

[cfhoney]

I don't know how to call it, but does anyone know what to do when the search engines have lots of pages that no longer exist?

I am in the process of improving the website to get ready for resubmissions. This will be a major push towards getting higher rankings. But I just checked our listings by entering our name and seeing what pops up and lots of urls we no longer have are listed.
I am assuming it would be good to get all this removed before I resubmit. How do I do that? I don't even know the names of all the pages.

Thank you to anyone who knows anything about this.

[cfhoney]

Just noticed the other thread.
But I still need more help than that. this is my first time trying to do this and I'm lost.

[Marcia]

cfhoney, this is what Alta Vista replied when I wrote asking about a similar issue and deleting pages from the index:

"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."

They were very courteous.

[cfhoney]

Thanks Marcia

That's a start.

[Marcia]

cfhoney, if the URLs come up in a search, and are no longer there, just submit the URLs of the found obsolete pages. When they find the 404 they will remove them - hopefully!

My situation was pages being changed to new URLs with dup pages left, which are actually now being redirected to an error page - so no duplication, except that the old pages are still in the index.

The other is a site I have to change to a domain name - don't want to give up the rankings, but don't want to have duplicates. I'm updating the site anyhow, so I'll take care of it in the process - a bit more difficult. I don't want to let go!

Keep us posted on how you're doing with this.

[cfhoney]

Marcia- Is there any way I can submit the obsolete pages without doing each one individually?
See, we used to have 2 folders that contained lots of information and therefore lots of pages. These folders no longer exist. But I just found out that some of the search engines still have the pages in the database. I would like to get them removed before I submit unless resubmitting the main url will tell the spiders to take the old pages out when they don't find them. This might work for the engines but not the directories, I'm assuming.
My stats reports are giving me the top error pages and most of the them no longer exist. So I think they are being referred by the SE's. Not good for business.

Thanks for your help.

[cfhoney]

In case anyone reads this, these are the links I have used to unsubmit.

[altavista.com...]

[addurl.go.com...]

Unfortunately, the other SE's are not so easy. Still working on those.