When should we use Remove URLs feature on Google Webmasters Tool?

[footd]

Hi there,

I run an ecommerce website on Magento. We are no longer using a category. It actually does not appear on the menu:

mydomain.com/category.html

If this is the case, do you recommend to remove it through the Removal URL feature on GWT?

I don't want this to affect the juice of other links of the site such as:

mydomain.com/product.html

Thanks very much.

Regards

[ColinWhite]

I would just 301 that URL to similar products that are as close as possible and or the home page of the site as this would be a better user experience than returning a 404. Although If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.

You could 410 them as 410's tend to drop out of the index faster.  If the page  has gotten a lot of traffic, then I might want to NOINDEX it. All in all there isn't a real one size fits all thing here, especially for eCommerce.