What to do with removed pages and 404 error

[SamCUK]

I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

I would look at this from two perspectives.

1. These thins pages could have been beefed-up with some unique content or at least the content could have been re-written to make them unique. Personally, I prefer to make the duplicate pages unique instead of deleting them.This of course depends on the number of pages and the level of duplication.

2. Now that these pages have been removed from the website, you should be erasing all the links to these from within the website from all the places like, sitemaps and internal linking so that the search engines do not find a link pointing to them that might end-up in a 404 error. You should also consider if there have been any references left to these pages from third-party web properties.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[AndersS]

Hi!

The reason why these pages keep popping up in WMT is that they have already been indexed. You could try to remove them from Google's index by using the removal tool in WMT (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal) or by setting up "301 Redirect" for them to more ideal pages.

Hope this helps
Anders

[Travis_Bailey]

410 is the recommended way to tell search engines the page is gone. all of the things mentioned above are a facet of how you should deal with this issue. sorry for the brevity and terrible punction. moz forum is a pretty iffy thing via mobile. my eggs are getting cold.

[David-Kley]

If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links.

http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html 

"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404"

We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.