How long does Google request 404 page?

[Phil_S]

how long will google ask for a page when it gets a 404 (Not found)?

No links pointing to the page(s) that is gone.

[Robert Charlton]

Phil_S - Are you asking, how long will a 404ed page stay in the index after it's been removed from a site?

In my experience, pages generally drop out in a month or so, but I haven't looked at this in a while.

Here's a discussion of ways to remove urls if you're in more of a hurry...

Fastest way to remove pages from google?
is it 404, 410, no index or..?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[g1smd]

They check that they are still gone, almost forever.

They do that just in case one day, they are no longer gone, but instead are republished.

Say you bought a domain name from someone and put up a new site. Say that Google refused to pick up your /about.html and /contact.html pages, and that eventually you found that it was all because once a page went 404 Google refused to ever look at that URL again.

You would think that was a bad policy. That is why it doesn't work like that.

[mblair]

g1smd -- what if there are no links to the resource on the Internet? I'd think eventually Google would purge it over time and stop checking for it. They'd then pick it up again cleanly someday down the road when one or more links to it popped up.

[trinorthlighting]

I have some 404 pages on one of my sites that I killed two years ago. Google still looks for the pages..

[plasma]

I have a site with 28 pages. Once we had trouble because of a DOS attack and Gs requests timed out.
Although all of the 28 pages are listed in sitemap.xml G still refuses to index half of the pages.
Due to a lucky mistake index.html wasn't listed in sitemap.xml. By listing it explicitly, I was able to force it back to the index after a month of it's absence.
The rest of the lost pages didn't reappear by now.

To make a long story short:
If you want to get pages out of the index, you can't, and if you want them in, you can't either ;-)

Maybe you should try timing them out when requested or returning "500 Internal Server Error". That's what happend here.

You could also try to return "410 Gone" via htaccess:

RewriteRule ^path/to/foo.html$ - [G]

Good Luck