Redirecting 404 pages
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Hello,We have a wordpress site that has some "hidden" pages with weird URL's. Due to the way the site was built (not by us) if we setup our standard practice for 404 pages some site functionality will be lost.Standard Practice for 404's www.domain.com/fafsaf shows 404 error pageProposed solution:- www.domain.com/safaf >forwards to> www.domain.com/404 - shows 404 error page. Will this stop the search engines indexing the pages? - we have also amended the robots.txt to try and stop some pages being indexed but we still keep finding the odd little "hidden" page.The aim is to try and get all the search engines just to index the few simple pages on the sitemap instead of finding all these extra pages.
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It can take Google a long long long time to remove old pages from its index. I'd highly recommend manually submitting the relevant URLs via Google Webmaster Tools' URL removal tool and do them a bit at a time. We have done this quite successfully. Otherwise, I think you're doing the right things. Hope that helps!
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