Redirection Not Easy

Suggestions and input please.

[a1call]

Hi,
I have a directoy site. however it is software driven and is not a normal directory. I used to have very long URLs for my subpages. I reprogrammed the site so thath now I have very short URLs.
Here is the problem:
The long URLs and the short ones Have essentially the same content exept that I added a line on top of the old ones stating that this page is outdated and please click here to go to index page. I can not redirect every old Url to the new ones as it would take some major programming to do so.
At my site I have no links pointing to the old URLs but I have some backlinks to them. I am hoping that google will drop the old URLs at the next update and only have the new ones in its index.
I know The desctiption is not very clear, but what I am asking is if some sub-pages are not linked to anywhere on an index page or any pages linked to from the index page, will they be dropped in the next update even though they exist?
Thanks in advance for your inputs.

[Netizen]

They won't get dropped if there are links to them - whether they are internal or external links doesn't matter.

Google regularly tries to crawl pages on sites that haven't existed for years, purely because someone out there has an out-dated link to them.

[a1call]

Hi Netizen,
Thank you for your reply. In that case I would put a nofollow tag on all the old urls. Can anyone tell me the exact format of that?

[SebastianX]

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

[echo1573]

i think it ought to <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

[killroy]

make it noindex,follow then add a link from there to the new page, and make sure the page has NO CONTENT so therte is nothing juicy to pick up. Ad a automatic redirect (meta or JS) of a few seconds, that folks who just look and stare will be forwarded properly.

To be honest, if you have the skill, use Apache mod_reqrite and an external mapping script to deliver the new urls for the old ones and then output 301 codes. That would be the best and most correct way of doing it, but you have to know how dot code cgi driven mapping scripts.

SN