Getting old pages out of google fast.

[eunicecat]

I have a very old version of my site in google an can't seem to get them to take it out. I have a nocache tag on my new site. Has anyone used the option to email the bot directly and get all the old junk out? Now I'm talking about pages that no longer exist --- not pages that I am using. G is the only SE I have this problem with.Emailing the bot? How would that work?Google updates sites as it goes along.If a page is no longer there it will eventually drop it from the listings, and if new pages are found it will incluude them.Well, it's on google's own site. That's what they claim. And as far as taking stuff off, my stuff is years old and still on google.Are you sure the pages aren't just in the Google cache? I had pages stuck in the Google cache for a year. I requested them to be removed using the Google automatic URL removal system (search for Remove an outdated ("dead") link in the Google site) and it cleared the cache in a few days and the links disappeared. If you do this you need to make sure the pages you want removed are returning a 404.if you have a robots.txt file that is blank - is that best for SERP?use a robots.txt you can find a model on the webmaster area at google.com if i will find the link i will send you a PMright now i don't remember itrobots.txt has no effect on serps (well, at least not one that contains no data. If you ban every bot from every page it would be a disaster for serps).If you don't need one it makes no difference if you just don't upload one or upload a blank one.This issue has been bugging me as well. We used to use Coldfusion on our site with the built-in session management using the URL as in http://www.oursite.com/page?CFID=123456&CFTOKEN=123456I eventually replaced this with cookies to make things more search engine friendly and had my code return a 301 with a location as follows:<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently" /><cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.ozzu.com/other-google-information-and-resources/#new_url#" /><cfinclude template="redirect.cfm" /><cfabort>So this is fully within the HTTP spec and basically tells all visitors, including search engines, that the content has moved to a new URI. However nearly 12 months on I've been shocked to find that Google STILL has hundreds of pages with these old URLs in its results. I followed the advice above and visited the 'Remove my site' page and found it makes no reference at all to how google interprets 301.I read once that a common SEO scam/scheme abused 301's but we are using them as intended within a single site and it should be a simple matter for googlebot to verify that the content of both URI is substantially identical.Anyway, I'm now faced with a choice:1.) Continue using 301 which means the old links will stay and keep their PR2.) Use 404 + redirect which will wipe the PR for hundreds of well-placed results3.) Same as 2. but using robots.txt (Disallow: CFID=*$)If the site was small I wouldn't care but we are a dynamic classifieds site with literally millions of pages. If I stick with the first choice I may get penalised for 'duplicate content' or does google know it's really a 301? On the other hand would removing thousands of old links make more room in google for our new ones (I'm assuming here that google has some kind of page limit per site) and remove the risk of being penalised for duplication.If the choice is 50-50 I'd rather go with 3.) since many results will be for sold items and out-of-date list results. Still, it IS traffic and that's always good.Anyway, that's the background. My question is basically "Is there a way to redirect google to the new urls so it removes the old ones AND keeps their PR?"BTW. Save your speculations - I'm only interested in replies from people who have been in this situation and -know- something about it. UPDATE:I found this on the Webmasters FAQ page:Quote:Hi - this is a reply to Roma's original question.Firstly - you mention that you have put a nocache tag on your new site. This is not what you want to do. You want Google to cache your new content and purge your old. You want as many up to date pages in Google's cache as you can get. So get rid of your nocache tags on the new site.You can get aged content removed from Google quite quickly using a combination of robots.txt and their on-line URL removal tool.Like you, I have had trouble with Google. All the other SE's seem to understand that when you have a 301 redirect for a page, that means it ain't there no more! It dun got moved! I have a site on which I moved some content to a different directory. I also use Google sitemap to tell Google where the pages of that site are. But it still insisted on putting entries in the SERPs for pages in their old location (a year old), in place of those in the correct location (as specified in the Google sitemap).I had thought robots.txt was just to tell the robots where not to go, but in fact if you put a disallow in the robots.txt - sayDisallow: /testdir/this will actually cause Google to remove any pages it has in it's cache from the testdir directory. Anyway, if you look at this pagehttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35303 it gives an explanation of how to use robots.txt to delete pages from Google's cache.The only problem with this is how long it might take Google to get around to doing this. So you can use their on-line removal tool to speed up this processhttp://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller/You need to create an account to use this tool and go through a verification process, but it does get the job done.Make sure you specify it right though and don't remove what you don't want to!