In going over the logs to a website I managed, I noticed that there were error hits on pages I had removed almost a year ago. I decided to investigate and found that Google was returning links to the pages from my old website.

Since Google was obviously not getting the message that the pages did not exist I decided to take matters into my own hands. Using the manual web page removal tool from Google I was able to get those old links out of the search results.

One thing to keep in mind, unless you page returns a plain old 404 error, Google will not exclude it. This is to prevent people from removing someone else’s real content.

Everyone should check from time to time and see if the search results for your site are valid. Do your part to eliminate 404 errors.