Google Removal Tool

Am no expert on ecommerce systems or zencart, but it sounds like you are doing something wrong or your site structure needs a tweak.

In webmasters/tools/crawl-error what kind of errors are you getting? If they are in the Not Found tab and are 404 or 410 then thats ok, because Google is just letting you know you've got pages that are no longer there. So it's just informational. You can select them all and mark as fixed and they should all disappear.

If they are server errors or soft 404's then this needs a bit more investigating. What are the crawl errors?

If you are removing your pages and they are correctly reporting as 404's, Google should pick these up quickly enough and you shouldn't need to manually remove URLs from Googles cache. We probably remove a URL once every 6 months.

If you remove a page from Googles cache, only for that page to reappear in Googles index, then there must be a duplicate URL for that particular product on your site?

hey ,yeah they are just the normal 404's you will get from when I have removed products from my shop

here's quick snipe of my page (hope it is OK to post this ) Not very clear unfortunately ,had to increase page font to see it clearly

Sorry read your post again and missed some thing

Yeah I used to just mark as fixed but they keep coming back again and again and again. I looked into it more and found some info about removing them with googles removal tool which is what I am doing this past many months..Although I often remember seeing the same urls 5 or more times as they were easy ones to remember and in google removal tool you get a message saying a request is already been made.

So they are flagged as 404s, you mark as fixed, and then they reflag again?

This is normally because although the page in question has been removed, someone somewhere is linking to it, so it shows up again.

We get it all the time, a business listing that has been removed from the directory, but other websites and pages are still linking to the deleted page. So it shows up again in the Google report. eg:

In this case, the saynoto0870 forum has 6 different links to a page we have removed, but google keeps flagging it:

"Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page"

Not much we can do about it, and we are automatically deleting pages on a daily basis, so we get lots of 404 Not found errors. If it's because you are removing old content, then don't worry about it. I never bother with the Google URL removal tool unless someone specifically wants details removed asap from Googles cache. Otherwise Google will naturally drop it from the index in around 30 days.

Not much you can do about inbound dead links though, unless you want to manually let people know. 

I suspect like us you are generating lots of 404 errors as you have lots of stale content that regularly needs removing, so I wouldn't worry about it. If it wasn't related to content being deliberately removed, then it is showing you that you have a page that can't be accessed. 

You do need to check out any soft 404 or server errors though as that cab point to genuine problems.

Oh OK ... Yes I do have a lot of 404's as have had a lot different suppliers over the last 4 years 2 or 3 of them have closed down and had to remove products and the usual troubles of products going out of production ... Although it would make it easier if we were able to remove them ourselves can't be that hard

If you have permanently removed your old product urls and they're still showing up then you need to set up a 301 redirect for each of them. 

The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location and instructs Google that the previous page no longer exists.

I would also back this up further by updating your Sitemap and resubmitting it to WMT which should help to get rid of your existing issue.

Hi Digitalhound at the risk of sounding stupid can I do this via htaccess ,if so how would I actually get it to work properly ,also would I be able to remove them after a certain time

I don't have any errors today nor have I had any for the last 3 days,so take this 1 as an example

http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/Lighters/ZippoBrushedBrass . I stopped these around 2 years ago lol

Hi Andy,

Yes, you can set up them via .htaccess using something as simple as this:

Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm

Not sure why you would want to remove them after a while but you can do so once the crawl errors stop.

Hope this helps

otherwise I will end up with a heck of a long list ,possibly around 200 as over 4 or 5 years I have stopped selling a lot of stuff or changed suppliers etc.