Cleaning up outdated google links

Does anyone know how often Google re-spiders URLs that currently exist in their index?

I am specifically referring to an index where the keywords used to find the link no longer exist in the page. How long can one expect to wait before the link goes away.

I have been able to remove the cache and the description text from the google listing using the URL removal tool but the link text still remains even though it is no longer relevant to the search criteria.

there's not much you can do. they refresh as they see fit.

the only thing you can do is if the page doesn't exist any more, send them the proper 404 header.

It is not possible to give a 404 as I am not the site owner. The account with all the information has been removed and the text in the link is no longer found on the site. The link brings up the main page of the site and says account terminated, but not 404. The search terms used to find the link are also no longer found on the site.

Any idea about how long Google takes to re-crawl and remove these kind of things?

if its not passing a 404, google will see it as a 200, and then index the 'terminated' error page... which means it will probably drop completely out of the index for the keywords its currently listed for.

That is what I thought, but do you have any idea how long it typically takes for google to drop it so the keywords don't find it? The keywords do not exist on their terminated page.

Originally Posted by briansol

if its not passing a 404, google will see it as a 200, and then index the 'terminated' error page... which means it will probably drop completely out of the index for the keywords its currently listed for.

the only thing you can do is if the page doesn't exist any more, send them the proper 404 header.

how do we add 404 for deleted threads or threads which do not exist any more ?

infact even stock vbulletin code adds a noindex tag to deleted or removed threads which google drops from there index

how can we add a 404 instead ?

use the vbseo option to send 404 code, or include custom script which writes a header 404. there's an article in the members' article forums about this