Former flash site generating lots of soft and regular 404 errors - how best to handle?

[BoulderJoe]

This post is deleted!

[EricaMcGillivray]

Have you updated the sitemap and deleted any older ones inside Webmaster Tools? It seems that Google's being cued from somewhere else that these pages are still live.

[BoulderJoe]

Yes, old sitemaps have been deleted, but I guess Google keeps pages it their index for some amount of days?  It would appear Google is trying to check those old pages it once had in its index, and my question is what is the right way to handle them - just let them go to a 404 error page instead of 301'ing them to a new page?

[EricaMcGillivray]

You'll want to 301 on them to a new page or the most appropriate page.