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I have put my web site up on the internet and google has pretty much completely indexed it. I have changed my url structure so now all the pages google has indexed are 404. Is there a way I can get google to delete all these pages and then

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2 Answers

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You should be doing 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. That way Google knows the pages have moved and associate the new URL with the old URL.

But, if for some reason you don't want to do that, don't do anything. The 404 errors will cause Google to eventually stop crawling those old URLs. The new URLs will be found through internal links on your site and through your XML sitemap. You did submit an XML sitemap, right?

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I was only really testing my site, so didn't expect google to start indexing yet. I don't have a list of the old addresses to programatically set up 301 redirects. Yeah I have an XML sitemap, so I guess I just have to sit and wait. – user15898 May 31 '12 at 13:20
Perhaps if you add a robots.txt disallowing all pages, the wait may be a little less. – pritaeas Jun 1 '12 at 15:06
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you can remove the old urls in webmaster tools, remove the old sitemap and resubmit a new one

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