Get rid of a large amount of 404 errors

[hometextileshop]

Hi all,

The problem:Google pointed out to me that I have a large increase of 404 errors. In short I had software before that created pages (automated) for long tale search terms and feeded them to google. Recently I quit this service and all those pages (about 500000) were deleted. Now google GWM points out about 800000 404 errors.

What I noticed: I had a large amount of 404's before when I changed my website. I fixed it (proper 302) and as soon as all the 404's in GWM were gone I had around 200 visitors a day more.

It seems that a clean site is better positioned.

Anybody any suggestion on how to tell google that all urls starting with www.domain/webdir/  should be deleted from cache?

[eyepaq]

Hi,

You have several options:

1. Do nothing as with the next or the third google crawl those pages will be drooped from the index (google's index / cache)

2. Set those pages to 410 instead of 404 - that mean page no longer exists so google will clear it's cache when the 410 will be discovered (next google's crawl cycle)

3. Request the folder to be removed via your Web master tool account and then block it via robots.txt

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html

Hope it helps.