Have some errors in my sitemap from deleted pages

I have quite a few deleted pages showing up as errors. I run a forum and have to delete some threads from time to time.

I always update my sitemap after doing so. I have about 2200 pages in my sitemap but Google has indexed about 4000.

I have the 404 page with a Google site search attached which is what they recommend for 404 pages to have.

My question is, does Google penalize you in any way for having sitemap errors due to deleted pages?

If the pages are deleted from my website and from the sitemap, why does Google even still care about them? They do mention this though:

"Note: Not all errors may be actual problems. For example, you may have chosen to deliberately block crawlers from some pages. If that's the case, there's no need to fix the error."

Do these errors stay on your dashboard forever or will they go away after a certain amount of time?

Thanks for your insight!

 

Good point. I will be doing noindex in the future. I didn't realize that I would be getting these errors if I deleted them.

 

It is ok to delete the pages from your site. After all, it's your site and you manage it the way you want and SE have no regards to it. Google have indexed those pages and you have deleted them afterwards. When the spider came across them, it simply didn't find them and marked them as 404. Remember that there's a timing difference between crawling and indexing. This situation will be updated as the SE indexes are updated. It unfortunately might take some time.

 

Great explanation thanks!