Removing rendundant or out of date pages from Google

[Stephen Tiller]

Hi All

This morning I have had a customer search in Google and has drilled down a few pages in the results and has clicked an old page which contained price information which was out of date.

I have since removed all redundant/out of date pages from my website and my server (Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0).

However these pages are still in Google's index, the page my customer clicked on contained an IP address and not a domain name. I have begun researching this and came across the following forum

[webmasterworld.com...]

I would like advice as to what the best/normal solution is to my problem and would like to know if this is a common problem. For example should I use the URL removal tool, robots.txt etc. There seems to be a bit of a debate as to what to do.

Regards

Steve

[g1smd]

If the URLs now serve a 404 status code in the HTTP header then that is almost enough aready.

Make sure that the visitor gets a nice HTML page of information explaining that the page they were looking for has gone, along with some links to your main content sections so that the visitor will continue onwards into your site.

Use a header checker to make sure that the status code really is 404.

[tedster]

If Google has cached information that you really don't want to show to the public any more, their Automatic URL Removal System at services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller -- used with care and precision -- will do the job for you.