Google Never Forgets

It's an elephant!

[Iguana]

My main site has been active since about 1998. During that time I have changed the structure a bit. First all of my pages were in one directory with "widget-pagetype.htm" as the end of the name. Then, for about 2 months I had "widget/pagetype/index.html". I finally settled on widget/pagetype/widget-pagetype.htm" a few years ago.

When changing the structure I have always used 301 redirects in htaccess. Recently I removed all those years old redirects. Now when I look at my Google Sitemaps I am seeing 'page not found' for all of those old urls.

I don't understand why Googlebot is still looking for those old 301'd URLs. I thought a permanent redirect after a few years would be understood. And I don't think there are many links to those old URLs either - so few that I am prepared to 404 them.