How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index

[VinceWicks]

I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index.

I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools:

http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/*

is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ?

Thanks in advance.

[Highland]

Are you removing the pages or just trying to de-index them? If you're trying to remove them, make sure the old pages return a 404 so they can't be restored to the index. If you're trying to remove them, make sure they are excluded by robots.txt or meta tag.

Here's the WMT Help page on the topic

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663427

[William.Lau]

It sounds like you want to de-index them.

Go into your robots.txt and disallow Google from the category..

It will look something like this:

User-agent: googlebot or *

Disallow: /web-design-news-all/

[benjaminspak]

In addition I would put the "No Index" meta attribute in the pages.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

[VinceWicks]

Thanks for your replies guys. Now I know how to proceed.