Removing some of the indexed pages from my website

[ArtiKalra]

I am planning to remove some of the webpages from my website and these webpages are already indexed with search engine. Is there any way by which I need to inform search engine that these pages are no more available.

[AlanMosley]

No, they will work that out themself. when they crawl, they will get a 404 status code, that will tell them what they need to know.

You can go to GWMT and remove them yourself if you really need them gone in a hurry, but i would not bother,, give it a few weeks and it will all be sorted

[MoosaHemani]

Well there are several things you can do:

Leave it as it is: and Google will re-crawl the site and eventually remove the pages from the search engine.

The SEO way: It will be good if you put 301 redirection to relevant pages instead of a 404 page, so that user may find a reason to stay on your website. Juice of that deleted page will also be shifted to new page and it is quite possible that your new page appear to rank better and more visible in SERPs.

Update the sitemap: Another good way is to update the .xml sitemap and update in GWT to let Google know what the status of the current website is.

And if you want to kick them out on urgent basis, then the formula is to use the URL Removal Request in GWT and your URLs will be removed within the next 24 hours.

[AlanMosley]

It is a good point, you can 301 redirect them, but this is only valid if they have links. you can only 301 redirect requests. If they have links then it may be a good idea to leave the pages in place or reuse the same url with simular content.