Removing a page in GSC - anyone done this?

[SwanseaMedicine]

I've deleted a bunch of pages, but they're still indexed by Google and showing up 404s. All links to these pages have been removed. Because they're showing a 404, our web dev team are saying that they can't implement a noindex tag, so I came across this -

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Anyone tried this? Or got a better idea?

We've also added all the pages to robots.txt but they still haven't been de-indexed.

Cheers,

Rhys

[LoganRay]

Hi Rhys,

The page remove tool in GSC is for temporary removal, but since the pages are actually gone, it's likely they won't come back. I actually just did this a few days ago for the same reason.

Blocking the pages with robots.txt will not remove them from the index. Robots.txt disallows only prevent crawling, not indexing.

[SwanseaMedicine]

Thanks, Logan! Did you have any issues with it being removed as a short term measure then? It does mention that it should only be used as a temporary fix.

Cheers,

Rhys

[LoganRay]

No problem! I just did this a few days ago, so I'm not sure yet. I would imagine that if the URLs aren't linked anywhere or listed on XML, then IF they come back to them, they'll see a 404 response and move on.