Removing OLD pages

[SharewarePros]

Dear all,

I was removing tons of old pages from my directory (about 400 pages), I was setingup a 404 custom page, all is fine, so when I go to an existing page I get a 404 and redirected to my 404 page.

The problem is Google Webmaster tools list all these pages as 404, and never clean my list (1 year til now), so I assume something is wrong.

Question what is the best way or natural to remove old pages from one directory?

Note: previously I tryed add on these pages the NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW meta tag and I got from google Soft-404.

Thank you

[irvingw]

if they have any pagerank from links poiting to them you might want to consider 301ing them to the most appropriate pages/section instead of 404ing them.

If you are 404ing them (that is a lot of pages to 404 though) then you can request removal of those URLs in WMT

Make sure you don't have any dead links on your site pointing to these old pages. run a broken link checker to find all broken links on your site and fix them.

[SharewarePros]

As usual you're very clear

Thank you

Claudio