I started using Google sitemap several weeks ago. It’s all working fine apart from several HTTP errors for pages which do not exist anymore or have been renamed for nearly a year. After reading through this forum, I decided to put some permanent redirects in place via the .htaccess file. I now ended up with over 30 redirects not all pointing to the same file and just wonder if this amount of redirects is classed as spam or a bad thing to do in general. If so, what other options do I have to get these pages out of Google’s system or shouldn’t I worry about them at all since I was reading somewhere that Google will eventually take pages it can’t find out of there system anyway.
Google shouldn't have a problem with the quantity of "301" permanent redirects. This is helping them after all. Options to get pages out of the Google index are: - Block the pages using robots.txt - Return a 404 header when the pages are accessed - Add the meta tag: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to the top of each page - Stop linking to the pages within the site. Eventually the pages should become supplemental results and sometime in the future disappear from the Google index.