Best way to fix a whole bunch of 500 server errors that Google has indexed?

[jim_shook]

I got a notification from Google Webmaster tools saying that they've found a whole bunch of server errors. It looks like it is because an earlier version of the site I'm doing some work for had those URLs, but the new site does not.

In any case, there are now thousands of these pages in their index that error out.

If I wanted to simply remove them all from the index, which is my best option:

• 1. Disallow all 1,000 or so pages in the robots.txt ?
• 2. Put the meta noindex in the headers of each of those pages ?
• 3. Rel canonical to a relevant page ?
• 4. Redirect to a relevant page ?
• 5. Wait for Google to just figure it out and remove them naturally ?
• 6. Submit each URL to the GWT removal tool ?
• 7. Something else ?

Thanks a lot for the help...

[TakeshiYoung]

If you already fixed the error, then just wait for Google to figure things out on their end. Having those errors in GWT isn't going to hurt you.

[BrightHealth]

Wouldn't you be showing 404's instead of 500's in the first place?

If the old URL's are still showing in the index, I'd reckon you'd want those 301'd to relevant pages anyways, at worst, at least a resource-heavy 404 page popping up rather than a 500.

[matbennett]

4/5 with a bit of 7

What you need to do is return the correct response code (I'm guessing that is either 404 or 410) then let google reindex those URLs. That way Google knows that those urls are no longer valid. However, if those URLs have links or get traffic then you might want to 301 them.

Let's look at a couple the other options though - it is interesting.

1. This will stop google re-visiting those URLs,Therefore it will always think they are there.

2. No index confirms they are there, but tells google not to return them in results.  Again this isn't correct and they will continue to return to and re-check those URLs

3. Unless the content is very close, this is unlikely to work. It is also wrong (because presumably they are not the same thing)

4. If they URLs have a common (and exclusive) directory it may be an option to submit that. It might though not be a good idea to submit lots individually - Matt Cutts has suggested this in the past.