I was working on a script, and made the mistake of allowing a dollar sign ($) to get into the url - it takes the first letter and creates a listing of all items that begin with that letter, and I forgot to have a $ stripped (book title). It got picked up by Google. I fixed it, and the script now returns a 404 error for the page. It is not linked, but it is cached (May 8, 2006) and does not run any Google services (Adsense, etc.) which is how I think it got picked up - when it did have content to show. (See crawl caching proxy servers) Now for the problem - that url shows up in some searches, I am finding pages that link to the site ranking higher for a key term, and I think it is causing ranking problems. So I head off to the Google URL removal tool which should let me remove that url from the serps. But there is one problem... When I enter the url the following error message is returned: Obviously, it is not invalid when it got used by the script, crawled and cached by Google, and it loads an error page with a 404 status code now. Why would that be invalid for the removal console? Should I just manually link to it and hope Google does not extend any penalty I think may be in play? Obviously, it is not getting re-crawled, and if it is invalid for the console, something may have changed since it was picked up... and may not get crawled even with the link. That is the best solution I can come up with, and might not work. Does anybody have any other ideas on how to get rid of that url without the console, linking to it, or running ads on the page?