How to remove junk pages from google index?

[Thaparian]

I recently changed the structure of my site.

I changed directories and page names.

Google has many old pages indexed.

I want those junk pages to be removed.

What should i do?

I have already added those directories and pages in robots.txt file.

What else i can do?

Or should i just wait for another week or two?

[tedster]

If the urls are now 404, and you've added them to robots.txt, those urls still may show as suppemental in site: search for many, many months -- and I would suggest letting Google handle them however they want to. Trying to force things can sometimes work against you.

If you are still seeing traffic coming from Google to those old urls, you might consider what they were looking for and actually serve them some relevant content. But I suggest not worrying about seeing a "perfect" site: search result.

And going forward from here, do remember that old saying -- Cool URI's Don't Change [w3.org]. So I'd say take some time right now to consider your new url naming scheme and if it can handle future growth and change for you without going through another upheaval.

[Simon_nw]

I had the same problem ... I took over responsibility for a site that was a mess. I rue the day that I re-organised it to be more logical and structured!

In Sitemaps, Google was reporting 404 errors on 29 pages that didn't exist anymore. I was struggling to think why Google was trying to crawl those legacy pages, so I used their "URL Removal" tool.

I've got a few of our obsolete pages listed there. It says:

2006-02-03 01:54:07 GMT :
removal of ......html
complete

But it doesn't stop Google trying to crawl those pages though!

Just to check that I haven't got any links lurking in our code, I downloaded the entire site to my PC and did a text search for those URLs ... nothing.

However, now our complete cache in Google has gone missing!

My conclusion is that although we have no cache showing on Google results, they do have an old cache lying in some murky corner which they are using to try to index our current site.

[kpaul]

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