Deleted forum from site now hundreds of 404s

[braap]

I added a vBulletin forum to an established site but never ended up doing anything with it so I removed it.

Now, when I look in Google's webmaster tools under web crawl, I am seeing 365 urls not found, all returning a 404 response. All of the urls are from the forum.

The site in question is put together well and ranks very high for some competitive keywords. My fear is google will see all these urls not found and penalize the site.

Should I remove each and every url with google's url removal tool? Or, will google just stop looking for the urls after a period of time? Should I even be concerned about this?

I appreciate any help.

[g1smd]

What do you think should show up instead for content that is no longer there?

The 404 is the correct response. Google knows the pages are gone, will list many of them as Supplemental for one year, and then drop them.

[tedster]

The only time I can see that Google might ding you for 404s is if you have lots of internal links to bad URLs. If you have removed all your internal links, then I'd say let Google do the house cleaning on its own schedule. Save the URL removal tool for emergencies and don't borrow trouble.

[braap]

Thanks so much for the info guys!