Doesn't Yahoo ever drop a page?

I haven't had these pages for two years!

[MatthewHSE]

I've got a few pages on my site that became outdated a couple years back. They weren't well-visited at all and I didn't know much about the search engines at the time, so I simply deleted the pages and forgot about them.

Now, I set up a script that e-mails me every time a missing file is requested from my site. To my surprise, Yahoo generates several 404's per day, checking for those pages I deleted so long ago. Presumably they still have the pages in their index and are hoping against hope that I will put them back up.

Doesn't Yahoo ever drop a page when it gets a 404? Or do they hang on forever?

Also, am I missing an opportunity by not recreating these pages?

Thanks,

Matthew

[abates]

Maybe some other site has links to it?

[larryhatch]

This sounds like free traffic to me. Whatever the pages USED to be about,
consider the most related materials you have at present.
Put back pages under the old filenames, and link away to your newer content.
Put some content onto the old pages too. I would say
just don't throw it all away if its getting any traffic at all. -Larry

[BillyS]

I use 410 (gone) instead of 404 (not found) and after a couple of months, Slurp seems to be forgetting about the pages. (Based on the number of 410s the server is issuing)

[topr8]

i never delete a single page, not since i did what you have just done ...

i consider every indexed page a little gem... use it, re use it, rehash it, do whatever you like to it - but never delete it, so i suggest you put them back at once!

[Easy_Coder]

MatthewHSE -

How ironic... I have the exact same problem and set up the exact same script this morning. Now I'm getting 404 errors on pages that I deleted a couple of years ago that were *junk*.

In general my site is dreadful in yahoo and kicks butt in google. I'm wondering of all these 404s from yahoo hurt my position in yahoo?

[Easy_Coder]

I ended up having to update & publish nearly 10,000 retired pages with 301 perms. These were pages that I removed in 1999.

If anyone needs c# code to automate this kind of update at a directory level sticky me and I'll send you the code.

[robotsdobetter]

I'm wondering of all these 404s from yahoo hurt my position in yahoo?

I doubt it because thousands of pages are removed daily and those web site still rank well in Yahoo! to date.