GG finding, and indexing, long gone pages

[Elaine]

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Why oh why can't GG simply delete pages that are no longer available, that are dead, gone to the URLmeister in the sky, as extinct as the Dodo etc,

Dropped for some key terms this morning - ohh I can feel the waves of sympathy and the overwhelming sound of tuts - and on investigation it's 'cos flipping GG has resurrected lots of pages that no longer exist and haven't for a few years- all with htm extensions - so looks as though I'm duplicating content again with my current shtml extensions.

Plus it's made up a whole load of new pages by adding a '/' to the end of some pages and annexing totally unrelated pages.

looking forward to a whole morning of the GG removal tool.

and YOU can stop smiling at the back there

[Sandis]

Why oh why can't GG simply delete pages that are no longer available, that are dead, gone to the URLmeister in the sky, as extinct as the Dodo etc,

Dropped for some key terms this morning - ohh I can feel the waves of sympathy and the overwhelming sound of tuts - and on investigation it's 'cos flipping GG has resurrected lots of pages that no longer exist and haven't for a few years- all with htm extensions - so looks as though I'm duplicating content again with my current shtml extensions.

Plus it's made up a whole load of new pages by adding a '/' to the end of some pages and annexing totally unrelated pages.

looking forward to a whole morning of the GG removal tool.

and YOU can stop smiling at the back there

Use Permanent redirects or also put on pages with some random content and use NOINDEX NOCACHE tags to get them out of index. Maybe helps.

[Elaine]

aah - you see that's what I'm up against - the pages don't exist - so I can't redirect them anywhere or put any content on them - all I can do is actually ask GG to delete them from their database - but some of them will emerge again in 6 months

[Brendon]

Ahhhh, now it seems I've heard a little something about this. Without wishing to go into the gory details, there have been some, um, minor errors mad at the 'Plex, and data is being rolled back and forth at a frightening pace in an attempt to go back to a stable index. That's why you are seeing dead pages appear back in the index - effectively, that's how Google "remembers" your site, and is treating it.

The only fix I can think of would be a custom 404 page, which points to your current pages

[Elaine]

thanks for that Brendon - I'll stop trying to fix it now and just patiently wait for things to go back to normal

cheers

[moredial]

Google has been doing this for years. Old pages disappear for years and then reappear.

For all dead pages, I have the following in my htaccess file, either

Redirect gone old/path/to/file.name

or

Redirect seeother old/path/to/file.name full/http/url/to/replacement/file.name

It seems to be helping, except for those pages which are glued into the supplemental results. Google may ask for then occassionally but the last cached date never changes.

The only thing to do with Google that gives any sense of satisfaction is to add the robots meta tag with googlebot noindex.

On a more positive note, the other day I was looking at Google's new accessibility database SERPs - page factors rule supreme and not a PPC advert anywhere in sight.
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?c...iate+marketing

[hawkwind dave]

Google has this crazy idea that it delivers 'relevant up to date results', when the majority of us know this is not the case.

Everytime i try to search for some current trends, eg. what is the most common screen resolution these days? I have to trawl through the results trying to find an article which is less than 2 or 3 years old.

if the pages google are 'bringing back from the dead' are ranking fairly well, would it be worth resurecting them and using them to point to more current content?

[moredial]

if the pages google are 'bringing back from the dead' are ranking fairly well, would it be worth resurecting them and using them to point to more current content?

If an old page is ranking, anything you can do to help your visitors find current content has to be a good thing. It may even help google find it too, and increase its relevance for the topic both pages are covering.