Removing a page totally

[tacimala]

I've seen 301 redirects covered a multitude of times on here, but what about when you remove a page completely? Is there something that should be done before removing the page to keep not only the 404 hits down, but also to not be penalized by Google and others?

[cbp]

Google's advice is here:
http://www.google.com/remove.html

CBP

[tacimala]

Thanks for the link.

So the way I'm reading it, being that the page will no longer be there, Google will just basically phase it out as soon as it spiders the page again. First off, would you agree? Also, do you think there is any type of penalization for anything like that? Google doesn't mention anything like that as far as I have read.