Google search results still list old out-of-date copies of my site. I have erased them or moved them to a different folder. Will Google just forget them in couple of days (because to the bots they will be "file not found" links)? If not, how do I go about getting search engines to refer only to the current copy of the site, and not the deleted (or relocated) files?
Am I going to have to delete the relocated files even though they are just back-up copies and are not being requested over the web? How do you deal with this kind of problem generally?
Thanks

If they return a 404 response it will/can take several months for them to be completely removed.

A quicker way is to redirect (301) to a page with a "noindex" value for the robots meta element. this should remove them in a matter of a few weeks.

check the Google Crawl log. Have you dropped robots.txt ??

Originally Posted by matt w

Google search results still list old out-of-date copies of my site. I have erased them or moved them to a different folder. Will Google just forget them in couple of days (because to the bots they will be "file not found" links)? If not, how do I go about getting search engines to refer only to the current copy of the site, and not the deleted (or relocated) files?
Am I going to have to delete the relocated files even though they are just back-up copies and are not being requested over the web? How do you deal with this kind of problem generally?
Thanks

Just by removing or replacing your pages to other place is not enough as your earlier pages are still in google and that is why they are showing in search results.

So you can do 2 things-
1. remove that pages from google through webmaster tools.
2. redirect old pages to newpages where you have replaced them.

Ibusinessarena,
In my visitor statistics page it shows that Googlebot has visited: 07 Nov 2009 - 07:01. As for a robots.txt file, I never created one, and when I type in http://thesweetwatercabin.com/robots.txt, there is no page found.
~matt

Having no robots.txt is of no detriment and of no benefit. It simply means that compliant bot will have NO restrictions on crawling parts of the site.

Primary concern is that the removed page do indeed return a 404 response.

Having no robots.txt is of no detriment and of no benefit. It simply means that compliant bot will have NO restrictions on crawling parts of the site.

True - there are a lot of ppl out there that think they have to do something w/ this file. Usually, you want any kind of bot crawl your site - but for some particular reason, sometimes, you may not want to.

I know I had to use it once to block one bot from coming onto my site (it was an Amazon bot) - I didn't like it snooping around (long story) - so I blocked it using the robots.txt file - but that was the only time I used it.