Google webmaster tools "Not found" problem.

[My_Media]

My webmaster tools shows me that my site has "Not found ‎(1,972)‎" pages. What should I do? Most links are from external links to my pages that are gone or deleted 2 weeks ago due to low quality.
What should I do with all these links coming in and landing on my 404 page?

Thanks in advance,

[tedster]

You don't need to do anything as long as the 404 status is actually being returned in the server header.

Most external links are not not under your control - so the 404 report in WebmasterTools is given to you as an FYI in case you do see a URL that shouldn't be returning 404.

[My_Media]

Great Thanks Tedster. That really easy my heart as I cleaning up this mess of broken links.

[lucy24]

Someone elsewhere on these Forums suggested that google deals with things faster if they get a 410 instead of a 404. In my own very limited experience, this really seems to be true.

Caution! That 410 doesn't just get sent to the googlebot. It also gets sent to your users. (Unless, possibly, you've performed some Fancy Stuff with your server.) And the generic 410 message is even less user-friendly than the generic 404 message. Easiest fix is to point users to the same error message for both 410 and 404, since it's very unlikely your visitors will care why the page isn't there.