Errors on my Crawl Diagnostics

[cardif]

I have 51 errors on my Crawl Diagnostics tool.46 are 4xx Client Error.Those 4xx errors are links to products (or categories) that we are not selling them any more so there are inactive on the website but Google still have the links. How can I tell Google not to index them?. Can those errors (and warnings) could be harming my rankings (they went down from position 1 to 4 for the most important keywords)

thanks,

[rhutchings]

Can you redirect those pages to some relevant category pages on the site?  The 301 may help in this situation.   Ideally you need to find out where the internal links are a eliminate them.

The 4xx errors arent the worst, and those pages should get de-indexed eventually.  Also make sure the xml sitemap it updated with the proper urls and those old ones arent in there anymore.