I once had few pages added to my site. After some time I removed all those pages. I had some back links for those removed pages. Now in webmaster tools (Not Found List), I can still see those pages after 5 months. Now, do I 301 redirect these pages to the main domain to solve this Not found problem ? What do you suggest?
I am having the same problem. I think redirecting them would help, but how do i redirect like 20 pages all with different URLS
I have a long list of redirected URLs in .htaccess. If you have backlinks for pages that are now deleted, always redirect them.
But thats odd. Shouldn't be the optimum solution. For those of us blogging in wordpress, there can be hundreds of pages instantly created if we just install and activate a new tags plugin. So if we delete the plugin, don't you agree it will be odd to put manual redirect for each of those thousand or hundreds of pages? Can't we simply add no follow to the category or line of pages that were previously deleted?
no follow? That's not gonna help you much. You want Google to know that the URLs have changed to a new page. After doing a permanent redirect, they will realize the old URL's are simply gone and do away with them. and your new ones will get back the ranking of the originals. Who wants a huge hit count on your 404 page? I honestly don't know of an easier way to redirect 100s or 1,000s of old URLs to new ones except in .htaccess. Thankfully i've never had that many. Maybe 100. But that was when the site was almost brand new.
if you are having links pointing those pages in current situation also, than you may go with redirection with deleted pages.