Why are deleted and blocked pages from cgi-bin being indexed?

[proboscis]

I have my cgi-bin blocked in my robots.txt but Google just indexed 193 pages that used to be within my cgi-bin.

Yes, used to be, none of these pages even exist anymore they've been gone for years but some sites are still linking to them.

I have removed them in the past using the url removal tool but they keep coming back.

I'm going to go remove them again but is there anything else I can do?

My traffic has gone down by almost 1000 uniques per day for the last few days, could it be related to this?

Thanks :)

[tedster]

Do you mean that Google shows these non-existent pages as a url-only listing? I assume there's no cache if you have no content there. Google will show a url-only listing for pages they see in backlinks, and the url-removal only lasts for about six months.

Does your server retrun a 404 or 410 status when the url is requested? And given that you have backlinks, you may wnat to 301 redirect those backlinks anyway - just to collect the link-pop involved.

[proboscis]

Thanks tedster. Yes they are url only.

They return a 404 - unless someone has linked to the page without the www then it looks like the page redirects to my 404.html page and the servers headers are actually a 301.

Is this something that I should try and fix or does it not matter? - as far as ranking

[tedster]

I really doubt that this issue could hurt ranking for other urls on your site. If the bad urls now return a 404, then Google should drop those urls without any further action. Just let them mull it over for a while ;)

But there would also be no harm in requesting another removal, either. If something is crossed up you could either get feedback that helps, or it might help Google to straighten it out.