Removing a large set of pages from Google's index

[morpheus83]

I changed the publishing platform of a fairly large blog from Movable type to Wordpress.

Movable type paginated by using queries -
mywebsite.com/index.php?page=23

however Wordpress does the same by -
mywebsite.com/page/23/

Based on this Google crawled thousands of pages using a combination of query strings -
mywebsite.com/page/23/?page=1
mywebsite.com/page/23/?page=23
So to get rid of the pages, I created a rule in htaccess which delivers a 404 for all pages with the query "page".

I can see a lot of crawl errors for these queries in my webmaster tools. Now I want to get these pages removed from Google's index.
So what should I do - mark them as fixed so Google crawl them again and eventually deletes them or
just ignore the errors and they will go automatically?

[phranque]

i would use mod_rewrite to 301 redirect all requests with a page= paramter in the query string to the canonical wordpress url.

[morpheus83]

You mean redirecting mywebsite.com/?page=12 to mywebsite.com/page/12/ ?

Well I did that for a year with .htaccess, but searching on Google with the site parameter still yielded results with the query mark.

So I resorted to 404.

[JD_Toims]

I think phranque means redirect:

mywebsite.com/page/23/?page=23

to

mywebsite.com/page/23/

And you can't remove redirects after a year or 5 or 10 and hope any major SE will just stop spidering them, because there are many times URLs are reverted or reused after a 301 is in place, so they keep checking periodically to make sure the redirect is still in place.

[dethfire]

Removing pages from Google takes a very long time. I've had thousands of pages go noindex and two months later, they are still in the index.

[kawen]

It is difficult to remove page from google index, Googlebot remember every url, never forget.