I had robots.txt blocking my phpbb folders which are now deleted

Should I remove that line from robots.txt now?

[cmendla]

I had phpbb running on one of my sites until about a year ago. Googlebot started running amok so I tried to exclude the forums by excluding the board folders in robots.txt. For a variety of reasons, I decided to remove the PHPBB boards. I left the robots.txt line excluding them in place.

Now the google webmaster tools is saying that a bunch of pages from the old phpbb board are excluded via robots.txt (which, in fact, they are)

My questions

- Given that the pages are no longer there, should I remove the line excluding what used to be the phpbb?

- Will those pages end up in the supplemental index (which I don't think would be a good idea.)

Thanks

cg

[goodroi]

If the pages are blocked by robots.txt then the engines are blocked from discovering they no longer exist. The reason you are probably seeing the message in google webmaster tools is because they probably see some links pointing to these pages. If this is the case, all that Google knows is that there are links pointing to a page so they assume that page still exists.

If you are 100% sure that the pages no longer exist, it will make no real difference if you modify your robots.txt or not. I personally side with the idea that "if it aint broke dont fix it"

As for the supplemental index concern, if the pages no longer exist than there is nothing for Google to index and place into the supplemental index.