Thread: How do I remove thousands of pages from Google SERPs?

I have a domain that had a previous owner. Google still shows thousands of their now nonexistant pages in the SERPs. I've modified my robots.txt to disallow all of those old pages (they were all conveniently in just a few /unique-folders/), but the old pages (which haven't existed for a couple of months) aren't going away, Google just isn't crawling them anymore. How do I remove thousands of non-existent pages from the SERPs? The one-at-a-time removal tool would be far beyond tedious.

you want to remove the robots preclusion for the directories in question. At the moment google can not spider them to find the 404 messages, therefore will not drop them from the index.

re-instate the browser access, and either hard 404 the pages, or you could try (although its not recommended, but Ive seen it work on other sites) rel canonical all the spammy content back to your homepage. That would remove them from the index and keep your link equity from those pages.

I completely agree with you,
[QUOTE=MOGmartin;18299]you want to remove the robots preclusion for the directories in question. At the moment google can not spider them to find the 404 messages, therefore will not drop them from the index.

re-instate the browser access, and either hard 404 the pages, or you could try (although its not recommended, but Ive seen it work on other sites) rel canonical all the spammy content back to your homepage. That would remove them from the index and keep your link equity from those pages.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for sharing that.

google will recognize it and remove it.. but you can still help to recognize the new site by gathering some links..