Okay, I am rather puzzled with this one. I had a forum on my server, with the path being mysite.com/forum. However, I changed the destination of my forum, but the pages from my old forum, were still being indexed. So, I removed all the files from my server, and deleted the database. However, I checked today, and google has crawled another 1000 or so pages of my forum, and comes up on the crawl report as an error. Now, I haven;t a clue how this is happening, but how has google suddenly accessed over 1000 pages of my forum that no longer exists?!
The pages were indexed in the past but only now are displayed.It take a long time before they disapear.
it happened to me too. try to do a 301 redirect, so if someone clicks it wont be taken to a missing page. it took me 6 moths to get rid of the forum pages.
Na, they are not linked to any other sites at all. I have setup a 301, and it just takes them to my homepage...but just rather annoying that all of those pages are indexed! Thanks for your input guys.
this is what happened to me. installed amazon script for products but never used it. never saw any results on google either until I removed the script recently. now I have over 6000 missing pages in sitemap stats. I read somewhere that redirect to a page may hurt that page, would rather that not be my homepage. any truth to that? when will the errors go away? I directed in robots txt not to go into that directory even though it isn't there anymore, is that correct? thanks
If those pages do no longer exist make sure you are using a proper 404 error page, that definately gives a status code of 404.
I have custom 404 for my root but the cgi bin gives the server 404. Is that what you mean by a proper 404? is a 404 is better than a redirect?
I am not overly bothered as all visitors to those pages go back to my home page, but still a little....irritating.
Fo imdiate removel you can use google removal tool if and only if you are giving 404 error code on those pages....