Using a Google Sitemap to Remove Pages

[gregdi]

I was wondering if anybody knows or has tried to remove pages from a web site via the Google sitemap. I am in the process of rebuilding a section of my site and have hundreds of pages that need to be removed.

My thought was to place the noindex nofollow meta in the head of the pages I want removed, list them in the sitemap, and let Google take it from there. I want them removed quickly because I am replacing these pages with new pages that have similar content, and I don't want to get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

[ogletree]

The sitemap does not do this. Google has an automatic URL removal system [services.google.com]. You have to set up your robots.txt correctly or use the correct meta tags.

[google.com...]

[gregdi]

The sitemap does not do this. Google has an automatic URL removal system. You have to set up your robots.txt correctly or use the correct meta tags.

Actually, what I am trying to find out is if I submitted pages that have the noindex nofollow meta in the head via Google's Sitemap tool, whether they would get removed faster than using the removal tool. I have thousands of these pages located in several directories, and I'm afraid it will take a long time to submit each page using the removal tool. If i could automate the task via the sitemap tool, it would be far easier. I'm just not sure how long it would take Google to remove these pages after crawling them with the sitemap.

The faster I can get them removed, the better as most of them show up as duplicate content.

[ogletree]

The sitemap thing is just for adding content not removing.