3

I have a website where 50% of the pages have a limited lifetime.

To give an idea, 4.000 pages appear each week and the same amount disappears.

By "appearing" and "disappearing", I mean that the appearing pages are completely new ones, and disappearing pages are removed from the website forever. There is no "this new page replaces this old page".

I naively used a 410 code on every URL where a page had disappeared. Meaning the url http://mywebsite/this-page-was-present-until-yesterday.php returned until yesterday a 200 OK code, and returns now a 410 Gone code.

I didn't use no redirect, because I want to tell the user that the URL he accessed isn't wrong, but that it is expired.

The problem is : Google won't acknowledge this information. It is still crawling the pages and Webmaster Tools alerts me as if the page was 404 broken. This affects significantly my "reputation".

Did I do something wrong ? How should I proceed ?

Elvex
  • 656
  • 5
  • 22

2 Answers2

0

The Webmaster Tools of Google enables you to delete certain pages. You can find this under "crawler access".

Try adding a noindex header.

Steeven
  • 4,057
  • 8
  • 38
  • 68
beardhatcode
  • 4,533
  • 1
  • 16
  • 29
  • With a noindex header the pages will never be shown in search results. It's a violent solution to the problem and I doubt that is the requested result. – Steeven Jul 08 '11 at 08:59
  • My pages already have ; and I can't delete manually all the pages each week – Elvex Jul 08 '11 at 09:29
0

It's always a very good idea to make your own error page. This can save you a lot of visits through broken links.

.htaccess error pages

Steeven
  • 4,057
  • 8
  • 38
  • 68
  • The problem isn't the visits on the page (which is customized) but that google doesn't treat 410 code properly – Elvex Jul 08 '11 at 11:32