Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?

[nicole.healthline]

We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?

[RyanKent]

I have experienced this same issue with Google.

I just began a test by making a change on my site to one of the URLs. I am bookmarking this Q&A and will try to remember to update it if I see a change. It can take Google some time to check any individual link so it could take weeks.

In case you are curious, I have added a 410 status code for one of the pages involved. 410 means the resource is gone, while 404 is simply not found. Perhaps the 410 header code will send the right message to Google.

[john4math]

Setting pages to 404 should be enough to remove them after Google indexes your page enough times.  Google has to be careful about this, because when many sites crash or have site maintenance, they return 404 instead of 503, so Google wouldn't want to remove pages from their index until they're sure the page is gone.

Google talks about removing pages from there index here.  The Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool is only intended for pages that urgently need to be removed, so I wouldn't recommend that.  Google recommends:

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. This will tell Google that the page is gone and that it should no longer appear in search results.
• If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
• Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).

Is there a reason you are 404'ing these pages rather than redirecting them?  If these pages have new pages with similar content, you should do a 301 redirect to keep the link juice flowing and to take advantage of these pages being linked to.  If you do continue returning 404 for these pages (or even if you don't...), make sure your 404 page is a useful one, that helps users find the page they're looking for (Google help article).

Also, Ryan, I'd be interested in hearing the results of using the 410 status code.  I would imagine that status code would do the trick!  I'm surprised I haven't read about this more, or why it's not mentioned in the help file linked to above.

[RyanKent]

Nice information John. I hadn't thought of adding a temporary page with a noindex tag but that sounds like a way to go for faster results.

I know Google has automatically removed 404 pages in the past. I noticed the issue Michelle is sharing and the information you shared offers great details on the process.