404 Pages and Google

[apauto]

Hi guys,

We had a site that had about 20,000 pages. We switched from that site to another format, and got rid of all 20,000 pages.

Webmaster tools is showing 404 for all of the missing pages, which is correct. However, it's now very very slow on picking up anything new. Could this be a result of the mass of 404s?

Is there a way to tell google to drop the 404s, they aren't coming back, give me back my authority?

thanks

[Propools]

Have you tried setting all of the 20,000 pages to 301?

[tedster]

You can 301 them if there is a reasonable equivalent. I would not suggest just redirecting them all to the home page.

A 410 response is a clearer signal than 404. It means "Gone", not just "Not Found". Google now takes that status code to heart and it really speeds things along for many sites.

[apauto]

How can I set those to 410 instead of 404?

Do you know if these tons of 404s would cause a drop in rankings?

[tedster]

The technical approach is going to be different depending on your server. You can ask for help in either the Apache [webmasterworld.com] or Windows IIS [webmasterworld.com] forum.

Whether removing those pages will make trouble cannot have a one-size-fits-all answer. You should study search traffic, backlinks and your site's internal navigation to understand the relationships involved.

It you only changed URLs but the content is still available on a new URL, then you should not go with 404 or 410 - you should redirect to the new location. Even then, you can have a disruption for a few weeks, or in some cases months. Changing 20,000 URLs is major surgery.

[apauto]

Thanks tedster

[walkman]

apauto,
make a list of those pages and submit it as a sitemap to Google. Google needs to visit the pages and then mark them as gone /not found.

[apauto]

walkman - yeah, they are already listed in WMT. How long until google drops them from the index?

[helpnow]

For 24 hour turn-around removal of URLs, use the URL Removal tool in WMT, under Crawler Access.

[g1smd]

By changing all your URLs you have thrown away all your incoming links, and reset everything so that you are starting again from scatch with a new site. You'll have lost all your "trust" factors and all "age" factors will have been reverted too. You'll lose all your rankings and your traffic will likely be near zero for weeks or months.