Deleted pages still registering as 404 pages.

[SwanJob]

I have a an all html site that I can only work on through the ftp. The previous marketing company ran a script that built thousands of location landing pages, but all they did was change the tags and headers and the keywords in the pages, other than that they are all duplicate pages. I removed them, but Google is reading them as 404 pages. How do I tell Google those pages don't exist? or do I just need to let the bots crawl it a few times and it will see that eventually?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Tim,

If you have deleted the pages and there are still links to them either from the same site or from external sites then these are indeed 404 (page not found) pages and they will continue to be until you either remove all links to them or 301 redirect them to new pages. Are you sure you have removed all the links to them from your site's pages? If you run the site through a moz scan then this will tell you the referring page that linked to the 404 page (the far right column) and you can go and check to see where the links are and remove them.

By the way, if it is an all html site and you have ftp access... cant you just download all the files and work on it locally?

Hope that helps!

[SwanJob]

Yeah I work on it locally. I think the only link pointing through those pages is on the site map. I think I need to go to the sitemap.php and delete all the links that went to those pages. Do you think that's a good place to start?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Tim,

Yes, any links to those non existent pages will be causing the page not found errors, so remove them from the sitemap. You should see the errors reducing (or disappearing completely) in the next scan report. If you still see errors in the next scan you can use the same process again to find any remaining links (if there are any).