how to remove many pages from Google/other SE's

[esllou]

I have hundreds of pages I want to remove from search engines.

example.com/folder/blue/page.html
example.com/folder/blue/page2.html
example.com/folder/blue/page3.html
example.com/folder/blue/page4.html
example.com/folder/red/page.html
example.com/folder/red/page2.html
example.com/folder/red/page3.html

but want to keep many more like:

example.com/folder/green/page1.html

how can I best use my .htaccess to do this?

and...what should I send any search engine bots...a 301? what is the best error message to get the SE's to remove the deleted pages from their index...always get my 304's and my 403's mixed up! :-)

[lammert]

You send a 301 if there is a comparable version of the deleted file on some other location, 301 is a redirect. Send a 410 if the file is simply gone. 404 indicates that the file is not found, but it might reappear after sometime, 403 is for access problems. Both 403 and 404 might be temporary problems. Therefore if a search engine is really checking the return codes 410 works better than 403 or 404 although my experience is that 410 also takes time in Google.

If you have many files to delete, put them in a robots.txt. Google has a removal tool at [services.google.com:8882...] You sign up, enter the URL of your robots.txt and the files will be deleted in some days. Yahoo has no self-help removal tool, but they obey the robots.txt and delete your listings in the index the next update. I am not sure if MSN has a removal tool, but they also read robots.txt.