De-indexing from the engines

What's the best method?

[panic]

I have a domain that's already indexed in all the major engines, and I've decided to change the content of it... which includes removing a ton of pages.

What would be the best way of de-indexing these pages?

-panic

[mack]

I would tend to just let the search engines spider the pages and find they no longer exist. They will then remove the missing pages from their index. Your current problem however will probably be a lot of users comming from search engines and finding your page is no longer there. For this I would recomend one of two things. Either use htaccess to redirect your users to a new page location or construct a custom 404 page. When you said a lot of pages have been removed that leads me to think that the content from those pages no longer exists. This will make redirecting difficult. The 404 page might be a better option.

Hope this is of some help.

Mack.

[panic]

Would 301 redirects do the trick as well?

-panic

[2_much]

Hi Panic, why don't you want to leave the pages up? Since they're being spidered, couldn't you keep them up, change the content, and simply throw in some keyword, anochor rich text?

[panic]

I've thought about doing that, but essentially, the content has gone from being my personal homepage to a .org with a purpose.

Needless to say, there's not much on-topic content I can put into a page that once held my Team Fortress Classic screenshots (the page was also titled accordingly). :P

-panic