Hello, Does Google really love 404 (not found) pages? One of my sites has a plenty of used-to-be, now-gone pages that all issue a 404 response. The pages were removed months ago from the site but they are still in Google's index as reference links: No title, no snippet, no cache, just plain links to the 404 pages. What's the point?
If your page 404 is different then your default web server page and has some nice content on it google indexes it not like 404 but like a normal page. So you better put some nice content and links up on your pages.
301 redirect your old web pages to the domain name or the catagory they were listed in, this way you can retain any backlink value the old links my have, not to mention current Pagerank value.
Also check whether your web server is actually returning a 404 code. Each web server returns a code before sending a web page. The code for an OK web page is 200. If your web server is sending a 200 code then Google will think that the page is OK, even if it has an error message on it.
If your page returns a 404 error in the header it will get removed from Google regardless of the page content.
use them to your advantage, put up a latest news or buzz on these pages and link back to your homepage. it'll earn link love through this
Make sure that those pages are giving 404 header status/response. Sometimes you see an invalid page but the header status is 200 then it won't be removed from G index.
It's not fault with Google as these gone pages may be linked from your site or from other sites ,so Google is indexing these pages again and again... Suppose if there is a page http://www.site.com/a.html which has a link to http://www.site.com/b.html( the page is now removed from your site) whenever google indexes http://www.site.com/a.html it also indexes http://www.site.com/b.html (which gives a 404 error)
Maybe I'll try this (from Google's support site): But still it doesn't make sense as the pages were gone a long time ago!