google and missing pages

[basschick]

you know what's weird? i took down all our sexually explicit pages on june 22 - every one. yet we have thousands of galleries still listed on google that aren't there - avs sites and custom fpa's, too.

considering how frequently google re-indexes stuff, isn't it weird that they would list pages that have been 404 for more than half a year, or am i missing something here?

[robin]

I have sites with pages that were indexed in 2000 and still get traffic to the non-existant pages via google and other engines for that matter.

It's funny in a way because the "google rules" say you're supposed to serve up 404 errors for deleted pages so that their spider will stop indexing the page in question and drop it from the index. I find that doesn't always happen. Actually it may not even happen at all for that matter. LOL

[gaybucks_chip]

It's very odd, but Google seems to knowingly cache pointers to a lot of pages that don't exist. I do know their algorithm revisits pages that it knows are updated frequently, so perhaps it's the same thing in reverse... galleries which are static might be revisited only very rarely and therefore stay in the Google cache for a long time. Just a guess...

[Lee]

It's very odd, but Google seems to knowingly cache pointers to a lot of pages that don't exist.

Yeah we've been trying to get some pages removed from Google for about 12 months because they dont exist, and, never have.

It looks as if someone created links to these pages deliberately so we'd get listed in Google for specific keywords.

Unfortunately, right now, there doesnt seem to be anything we can do about it apart from wait to see if they do eentually drop.

Regards,

Lee

[gaystoryman]

One common explanation for pages still being listed is someone else is listing them or linking to them.

Use the Google 'remove pages' help form and generally that will get them off or else list those pages in your robots.txt file with a disallow statement.

Also if you decide to go the other route of using the traffic, use a 301 redirect in your htaccess file as that will also signal GBot that the page has changed locations.

Sites not updated often get crawled considerably less as well.

[tigermom]

Yes, a 301 should do the trick. Otherwise, just catch the traffic and direct it to your working pages