Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?

[VoxxiVoxxi]

I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring.  This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc.   Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them.

By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back.  The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors.  The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere.

Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again?

Thanks

-Juanita

[irvingw]

wait, when you say this do you mean broken links on your site or links on other sites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist?

"Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them.  "

If internal links then by all means fix broken links on your site.

If external links pointing go your site, don't have those sites remove your links - just 301 that old url that they are pointing to (if there is PR to be gained) and point them to the closest similar page or section. If it's only a link here or ther then let them 404. 404ing is a natural occurance and Google has no problem with it.