Removing urls from the index

[rros]

One of my sites, a wiki -unattended- got spammed crazy.

There is no way to clean it up with thousands of pages created for the purpose of dropping links. I now have removed the wiki script but have kept the site on the server rendering all wiki pages 'not found'. Still, Google has cached all of these pages and won't be spidering them again as there are no inner links to follow. Is there a way to remove them from the index?

[tedster]

If Google indexed a url, then googlebot will be back to check on it, whether there are still any links pointing to it or not. Their "crawl" is not like a human visitor clicking on links. If any url now gives googlebot a 404 response, then it will eventually be dropped from the index. Google doesn't want to send their users to a page that is 404.

In the meantime, if the url isn't ranking for anything then it's not generating search traffic - so there's no major concern. If it is ranking for some search phrase and you want to accellerate th process of having that url dropped from the index, you can submit a url removal request through your Webmaster Tools account.

I understand that it's not practical to submit a removal request for thousands of urls, but in this way you can just focus on any urls that are currently a practical problem.

[rros]

Thank you, Tedster. Will wait a bit. The only concern is that they make me look bad... I removed my links to that site just in case. Hopefully gg will come back and do the cleaning.