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I have several outdated links on my website that are not used anymore. I give an HTTP error 410 (Gone) and have X-robots-tag: noarchive in the HTTP header to try to make google stop crawling the page, but instead, Google states the error is a 404 (not found) error, and when I go to validate fix, Google just ignores it and puts the same error back up in the google search console.

How do I force Google to do this?

I understand there is an option for a temporary page removal request, but sometimes I have URLs that are in different paths and because I run irregular events, I would have new URLs that will become useless.

So if I had a one-time event with URLs like this:

http://example.com/event1/details1
http://example.com/event1/details2
http://example.com/event1/details3

Then I could ask Google to do a temporary removal of this folder:

http://example.com/event1

But if I had 100 different events that use a similar URL structure as above, then there has to somehow be a way to have Google remove all 100 (when they end) without using the temporary URL removal request 100 times. Also, my real events have actual names so asking google to do a temporary removal of this folder won't work:

http://example.com/event*

So what can I do?

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, you can't do it in batch.

From Google's point of view, what you can do is:

  1. Verify that it returns a 404 or 410 error code. Use an external service to verify the actual code being sent, and that there are no errors or conflicts.
  2. The NoArchive tag is overkill. Once identified as no longer available with the 404/410 code, it will drop from the index (in theory a 410 will drop faster since a 404 is treated as a "soft not found" and thus takes a bit longer to be removed).
  3. Use the Schema Event and notify on the page when the startDate and endDate are.

From the users' point of view, ensure that your 404 (or 410) page helps them get to your currently available content.

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