Is this normal?

Takes six months to get rid of dead links?

[Jesse_Smith]

Back in November I changed a lot of files from .html to .shtml and the old database lists 2,430 of the dead dlinks, while the new one listed just a few. Is it normal for it to take this long to get rid of the dead links? Doesn't the Googlebot hate redirects? All dead links on the domains redirected to a certian URL and until now the links title and description showed the page info from the page that you got re-directed to.

[jdMorgan]

Jesse_Smith,

If you want 'em gone, you need to return a 404 or 410 server status in response to request for those pages. It's OK to have a custom 404 or 410 error document for this case, but you need to use either of those server codes.

If you send a 301 or 302, then Google will do what you ask, and redirect to the new page.

301: Moved Permanently
302: Moved Temporarily
404: Not Found
410: Resource is gone

If you can't control your server response due to hosting limitations, then maybe you could put a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> tag on the page you redirect to. That might help (not sure).

HTH,
Jim

[Jesse_Smith]

There out of the new database. This is what I did for each error mesage in .htaccess.

ErrorDocument 404 [example.com...]

[edited by: heini at 8:32 am (utc) on May 6, 2003]
[edit reason] accidental linking removed, thanks [/edit]

[Multiverse]

I never understood, why Google will keep pages that only contain a "301: Moved Permanently".

If the page moved permanently to a new location, why keep the page with the redirect in the index? It's only purpose is "don't look here, look there". Or am I missing something?