Forum Moderators: open
we want to delete many pages (I mean really many, no way we can use robots.txt) from the google's index. In the middle on December we deleted the files and the server has been returning 404 error, but since then googlebot visited just few of the pages which doesn't come as surprise since they all had pr 0 (the rest of the site is 4-7)
the pages are still in the index, so what's the best to do now? should we leave it like this (404 error) and wait? or add permanent redirect to our 404.html (returns 404 error)? or permanent redirect to some page returning the 200 code? anything else? will googlebot re-visit a page (w/o incoming links) that once returned 404 or the page will be removed from the index and googlebot will never bother to check it again?
thank you
If memory serves, Google prefers to see a 404 when the page no longer exists.
No, Google prefers to see a 410. 404 means "it's not here", while 410 means "it's not here, and it's never coming back because I deleted it intentionally". Big difference.
