Due to major upgrades, we have a bunch of dead urls that have been indexed by google but go to "page not founds" to get these out of google's cache, should we just wait until google updates, or should we redirect them to other urls on sites that we own. If we redirect our dead urls to live pages, will they eventually be dropped? Ideally, we want them to be taken out of cache, but there are so many that requesting them all to be removed would take months.
cached data contains the site at the time of crawling.You may just wait for the google to update it. try top get good back links from high PR sites.that may help in much more crawling.
hey, that does not really answer my question is the best way to get rid of dead links from google's cache simply to not redirect them so eventually they get picked up and eliminated?
I think you should better config your server and wright your own 404 pages, where you can redirect users to main page, or some other pages, as you wish.
What you need to do is just restrict/disallow these dead urls using robots.txt and then sign in your Google webmaster tool account, there go to Tools and then Remove URLs, using this you can request Google to remove all your dead links from Google index....
You can also use Customized Page for those dead links (I think it's "mode rewrite" thing), whenever a use click for a that is dead, instead of seeing page not found, a customized page will appear saying also the page is not found but you give them a choice to browse other parts of your site.
going the webmaster tools method will not work as we do not have a separate directory for all the dead links. We've had to go through the site by hand to delete all the unwanted content. If we redirect all our urls to our homepage, will they still eventually be dropped? My fear with this approach is, if the so called dead links still go to a live page, how would google know to drop them?