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A site I worked on recently used to be joomla based and had a ton of articles within it and the entire business is different.

After clearing out the site (FTP) and starting fresh and finally finishing all was done however, the sites rankings on google are plagued by old pages which no longer exist. Furthermore, Google seems to think these pages do exist.

I was under the impression that after recrawling the site (at whatever time it saw fit) it would recognise those pages are now non existent and replace them when it could.

Its driving me insane. There are 100's of pages, so I can't put in requests to remove them all, won't they ever automatically be removed?

Zaheer Ahmed
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JEV
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3 Answers3

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It will take a while but they will eventually stop looking for those pages. They keep trying for a little while under the assumption that their being missing is an error and they will return. If you're not going to do removal requests then you will have to simply wait it out.

John Conde
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  • Thanks, as long as they go... I was just wondering, as I am trying to get the site up to the front page, but I feel so far from it :/ – JEV Aug 16 '12 at 14:18
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Make sure, all old pages are returning 404 or 410 status. If Googlebot encounters multiple times 404/410 status, it will remove them from index.

Also suggest to check if any of those pages are having backlinks. If Googlebot keeps encountering backlinks to outdated page, it might still hold them in their search index. If there are some pages with valid backlink suggest to 301 (re-direct) them to valid pages.

khadim
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Try the answer using Google WebMaster Tools you may find here.

Community
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Juan Ignacio Pérez Sacristán
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