Ref URL - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...5US335&q=site:herbsandcures.com&start=40&sa=N We recently revamped this website - http://herbsandcures and restructured the URLs of inner pages eg http://www.herbsandcures.com/Herb/114/Common-Walnut.html no longer exists instead details of this herb 0 "common walnut" is now showing on - http://www.herbsandcures.com/114/common-walnut-details My question is - how can I remove old pages from Google index and add new pages? I have already created the new sitemap.xml and re-submited but still new pages have not been indexed and google still shows my old pages in its index.
You want the "old" pages to return a response header of 301 (moved permanently) 404 (not found), or 410 (gone) Use the 301 if the page still exists, but under a new URL. Use the 410 if the page is truly and permanently gone. Use the 404 if you are lazy and sloppy. If you are serving the correct response headers then Google will figure it out. My experience suggests it takes as much as 3 months for the changes to accurately be reflected in the SERP's. YMMV
I am also wondering about how to solve a similar issue about my blog... what is the benefit of the 410 redirect? I know the 301 can lead to the new page's URL and the 404 is a page not found, but I've never heard of a 410 redirect
410 means...GONE If the page is gone, terminated, nada, then use a 410. If you don't know your response headers, it is always good to go to the source.
In this case, you'll want to do a cache removal request, which does not require the page to return a 404; it just requires that the webmaster modifies the content. While going through the steps documented in the help link below, you'll want to choose "The site owner has modified the page..." option. Make sure you include the correct URL (the page you mentioned, not the URL of Google's cache) and only mention terms that were on the page but are no longer there. http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=92865 Google cache removal