Google & Frames

Google has indexed non-existent page

[austtr]

Some months ago I de-framed a small site. All the frame pages (frtop, frcontent, frmain etc) were deleted at the time.

For some reason, Google now has the site indexed as:

www.widgets.com/frmain.htm

which of course gives a page not found error. The site owner is not a happy camper!

I'll wait until after the (ssshhh) update :) but if it is still wrong, what is the best way to get this resolved?

[ScottM]

If it were me...I'd put up something funny on the page that was indexed.

I like using humor in a situation like that. Something about lemons and lemonade..

[Powdork]

Yes, do what Scott said or if the owner wants just leave a nice businesslike redirect page. Then put a robots noindex/nofollow tag on it. Where do your incoming links point? That is likely the cause of your problem. If you've changed them all then keep in mind they will take longer to be indexed than your content changes.

[darnbarn]

I recently did the same thing (removed farme pages), but what I did to solve the problem, was to make a copy of the main page of the site and make that a custom 404 by naming it missing.html

There are other options, such as re-directs too, but I didn't want to present the visiotr with a "this page has been moved" or get into trouble with SE's that exclude pages with re-directs. I see some sites using the custom 404 to advertise products, but I thought the main page would give the visitor the best options.

This way, the site that the visitor lands on is the main page of the website where they can navigate to what they are looking for. Then of course add the old pages to the robots.txt so the bot won't keep trying to spider them.