Sitemaps and URLs that no longer exist

[MrStitch]

I finally got a sitemap for google, and now Sitemaps is showing me all these pages that the bot couldn't find.

Which is normal, cause the pages no longer exist.

Will Google remove these old pages from the index soon or do I have to do something on my end?

Would be nice to have a little check box where I can tell them if the pages were there or not, and a submit button.

[Oliver Henniges]

To my experience the quickest way to remove non-existing-pages from the index is to submit dummy-pages which contain the noindex meta-tag in the head section.

However, google also tries to find pages, which never existed, simply if someone pointed to a wrong url in a forum or so. I'm still wondering how to cope with that.

Back in summer, I think, googleguy mentioned that approximately one third of all links all over the internet are broken.