How long does it take Google to remove the old pages info?

[megame]

Hello everybody,
I updated and deleted about 2,500 pages from my site half a month ago(May,6th).I wonder how long it will take Google to remove all the indexed pages that are nonexistent from its database.For Google,it seems slow to do so.Thank you in advance.

[artagnan1978]

It depends when will the google spider crawl.

The update to your site was half a month ago, you don't have much more to wait. In maximum 2 weeks they will be updated.

If you are lucky, maybe even sooner.

Kind regards,
Izabella

[wige]

I have found much the same, Google generally crawls a page once a month, and a 404 will typically cause the page to be dropped immediately (or within about 2 days of the crawl). However, Google will remember that the page did exist, and will continue to recrawl that page for up to a year, longer if there are still links pointing to that URL.

[DONtk]

I think if you going to play it safe you not only have to delete those pages from Google, but any other directories and search engines. I don't think just removing your you URL from Google will remove the pages. Remember that Google spiders search directories and other web sites that you might be linked to.





I hope this helps you

Don
D & C Discoveries
San Francisco, the city made for discovering, over & over again!

[Iggyjac]

Hi Megame!

Try also to check with your webhosting company what kind of error message is delivered to the googlebot when it tries to re-index deleted pages. Preferably you should go for a 301 (permanently moved) error message guiding the googlebot and other visitors to an error-page you make for this situation and other types of missing pages on your site.

Installing Google Sitemap also helps with faster re-indexing.

Good luck

Iggyjac

[megame]

Artagnan1978,Wige,DONtk and Iggyjac,


Thank you for your advice.Actually,when Googlebot recrawls the outdated pages,they return a status of 404 in the header.Then,Googlebot knows that the requested URL isn't valid and deletes the pages info from its database.For google,nothing special,just takes a long time to completely delete so many pages.Google presents a useful tool that makes it possible for webmaster to remove the outdated pages quickly.

See:

https://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=508...lev=answer




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[NateDesmond]

Megame, great post! That article on Google tells exactly what to do.

[Mads Dam]

Try google sitemaps...

[megame]

Originally Posted by NateDesmond

That article on Google tells exactly what to do.

Ya,I know what to do.