Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether

[andyheath]

Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages.

We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google.

I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap.

My questions are:

1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether?

2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?

[andyheath]

Brilliant thanks Dan.

This is what I'm going to do.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Andy

To answer your questions:

1. So if you're 301'ing the page, it's not really a 404 page, it's a 301 So yes, you can remove the 301 redirect, making it a true 404 page (check that it returns a 404 code using fetch as google or a tool like urivalet.com).

2. If they are in the sitemap, this won't prevent Google from removing them from the index, but it will throw an error. And not that many people care about Bing, but Bing is apparently super picky about having XML sitemaps perfect.

So yes I would just 404 them without the redirects.