Orphan pages showing backlinks

Anyone see this before

[steveb]

I had a few orphan pages on my site. Was like this, old pages:
domain.com/widget1.html
domain.com/widget2.html
domain.com/widget3.html

I changed my structure to make it:
domain.com/widget/page1.html
domain.com/widget/page2.html
domain.com/widget/page3.html

I just left the orphans up since they were still showing in the SERPs (especially non-google ones). March update I discovered I had missed one link to widget1.html, so those three pages showed up as linking to themselves, plus the one other link. I removed the one link before last month's deepcrawl and expected that this update the pages would not have backlinks and I would finally just delete them.

Wrong. These pages are now showing 70+ backlinks -- the same number as their mirror page within the /widget/ directory.

I have no clue how Google even knows these pages are here, or why it assigned them the same backlinks as the mirrored pages, or even how Google is smart enough to do that in the first place. I now just deleted all the old pages, and will live with the possibility that people will come to 404 pages. i don't want redirects or anything else, I just want Google to now know these pages are gone.

The question is, has anybody seen this phantom backlinks phenomenon before? And what are the implications of Google assigning these phantom backlinks?

[vincevincevince]

you'd do better to either use mod_rewrite to redirect with a 302, or replace each page manually with a 302 redirect.

that way all will be sweet :) IMO