MSNBOT continues requesting OLD content

[craig_d]

msnbot continues (multiple times daily) to look for several PDFs that no longer exist on my site - they are obsolete products and were removed about 2 months ago. Interestingly, the PDFs don't even appear in their search results!

1) Is there a good way to redirect the spider to the new content? I currently have a custom 404 page with a META redirect after 5 seconds to the homepage.

2) How many 404s does it take before they stop looking?

3) Why would they continue to request content that doesn't even appear in their search results?

Thanks in advance for your wisdom.

[nancyb]

I'm seeing this a lot, too. Maybe their bot isn't any smarter than inktomi's who keeps looking for old files - for years :(