I have replaced an old section of one of my sites with a new one and I wonder how to best go about removing old pages from the Google Index?
I had the same issue...wth about 5,000 of my pages that were being dynamically generated. If it's not too many pages, I would set up a permanent 301 redirect to the new pages. If you are in the same boat as me (where redirecting 5,000 pages to 5,000 other corresponding pages was out of the question) you can update your robots.txt file to disallow the crawler for those pages. These pages will eventually disappear from the google index (or at least drop into supplemental).
Oh btw...you can find more info on Google's help pages: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301&topic=8459
Setup a 301 redirect but if the pages arent getting any traffic they will disappear on the first few 1000 pages
Well, I think the pages will be removed automatically by google. Google will find unvailable pages over & over and hopefully remove them. I guess this may take a little while...
I think robots.txt will be the best solution for me - it's only about 500 pages, but I went through the site and removed all on-page links to the old content (old forum) and have directed all links to the new subdomain forum.
Well Its been like a week since the google bot captured the page while I was editing, and captured a MySql error instead of my webpage -__- grunts
Hm. I am not sure I would use the robots file. Why not redirect all of them to your site root. At least this way you are not throwing away any crawler traffic. Not sure if that will actually work or not, just make sure they are 301. If you are lucky, you can redirect 5000 pages in one line in .htaccess (depends on the url structure, but you may be lucky to get away with one regex).
you can use http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=reload&lastcmd=login to remove your pages from google index
I agree with edr, 301 redirect is best to inform Google to update their index to point your section to a new one. This way you have updated your Index in Google and retained your traffic at the same time.