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About 7 months ago I uploaded files to the wrong web server and it was one day before i realised my mistake. Basically it was a whole website and got uploaded into a directory on another website server. There was no link to that directory but somehow google indexed all the pages. Over the last 7 months, although I took those pages off, they keep intermittently appearing in a site search for the first site. For one period of 3 months they didn't and I assumed the problem was resolved but now they are back again even though that directory hasn't existed for 7 months. They show up as a supplementary result and of course when you click on it it comes up with a 404.
In tandem i seem to be having trouble getting most of the pages of this other site into google...only 5 pages out of 120 are in. Up till now i assumed this was a problem of not many quality links but now I'm not so sure.
The new site is fully indexed in most of the other engines without problems and comes near the top on msn for most terms (which in my opinion shows how poor msn is as my site has little content!) :)
any ideas?
can i stop google indexing what isn't there with the robots text?
Not much you can do about it. If the pages are no longer on the original server, the listings will eventually disappear.
Don't just delete the "bad" pages, redirect them to the good ones with a 301 status code. Google (usually) drops redirected pages faster than it drops 404'ed ones.
That makes me feel a bit better. 7 months seems a long time but I'll keep waiting. Would a robots text stop it quicker?
