Removed URLs

[businessowner]

Hi all,

We have recently removed 200+ articles from our blog. However, those links are still being shown on Google weeks after their removal. In there a way to speed up the process? What effect will this have on our SEO ranking?

[Essential-Pest]

Sounds like you may need to redirect those links. If they are non-related blogs, then it is a good thing you took them off. The only thing I would suggest is making these changes moderately and paying close attention in the chance that Google does update and you get docked, that way you can go back to the old version. Making extreme changes can be shown as "bad" through Google in a form of being untrustworthy.

[Linda-Vassily]

Have you tried submitting a new sitemap without those pages?

In general, 404 errors (assuming that this is what is happening) are not a problem as long as they are not causing major user disruption. Also, you should check that your own site is not linking to the discontinued pages.

[businessowner]

I actually re-direct all of them to a page containing all the blog posts. Would that work well?

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, if I would be at your place, I will choose one of these solutions.

-          301 the URL to appropriate live URLs so that when traffic lands, it go to relevant page or a custom 404 page that tell user the page is not available (and give links to other parts of the website). This is a good idea to retain visitor to the website even when the page is dead.

-          If you really want to remove the URLs from Google, in webmaster tool there is a remove URL section, use that and it will remove from the index for 90 days and as the header status of those URL is already 404 they will not come back again. Ever!

Hope this helps!

404 hurt rankings? In my personal experience, too many 404 on the page does!