Removal of dead https urls from Google index

[AlhazredTheSane]

First time poster, and I seem to have a big puzzler for regulars. We have a site that has been redeveloped a lot over the last year, and our problem is that Google has close to a thousand dead links indexed from the previous site. Because these pages are https the Google url removal tool doesn't work.

Our solution has been to create a page called oldpages.html and list these dead urls there with comment that all these pages no longer exist, and on the last crawl Google seems to have removed the 20 pages we used as a test.

My question, will this affect how Google ranks the home page (which is the only place the oldpages.html is linked from), will we drop in position in the SERPs?

If anyone knows anything on this subject, I'd be delighted to hear about it.

[WW_Watcher]

Hey AlhazredTheSane, Welcome to Webmaster World!

If you are wanting to remove pages from the index of your https site, IMHO, I would block https with robots.txt.

Back to watching,
WW_Watcher

Edited to add, I do not think the test you did listing the urls on a new page, did anything but cause more errors looking for pages that do not exist.

[edited by: WW_Watcher at 2:24 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2006]

[g1smd]

If the pages do not exist, and you return a 404 status code in the HTTP header, then Google will correctly handle it.

As written before, they show old URLs in their index with an old cache for up to a year so that people who looked at your site a few weeks or months ago can still find the information again, even after you have deleted it from the site.

[JackR]

Adding a .410 status to each page you would like de-indexed seems to work very well ...

[AlhazredTheSane]

Thanks to all, we'll try the .410 status addition and see how it works out.