Any benefit in cleaning up old links?

[hannamyluv]

Google currently has a lots and lots of links from our site indexed that are basically worthless. They are links that have session IDs that have expired and now default to a "Your session has expired" page.

We have fixed the session ID thing and the new URLs are being picked up, but those old URLs are still out there.

Is there any value in manually requesting those URLs be removed or will G filter them out eventually or does it really not make a difference that they are floating around out there?

[cabbie]

Makes no difference I reckon.

[mcavic]

If they were mine, I'd clean them up. You should be able to get the site to return a 404 error for the invalid URLs, and thus they would be automatically dropped.

I have a feeling that the number of pages Google will index on your site depends on your PR, so that having useless pages might be preventing some useful URLs from being indexed.

[shrirch]

>> I have a feeling that the number of pages Google will index on your site depends on your PR

I agree. We had to 404 a number of pages in the past and took a small hit for 30-45 days, but the newer pages came back stronger.

I strongly belive there is some sort of threshold related to PR. I see google crawl thousands of pages every day, yet, see a fixed number in allinurl. So, either allinurl is broken (don't think so...) or there is a threshold.