Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring.  This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc.   Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them.

By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back.  The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors.  The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere.

Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again?

Thanks

-Juanita

In the setting of a news site, with articles that often link to one or more outside sources, is it a good idea to rel="nofollow" all external links?  Would this hurt link-building prospects?

Of course, internal links would keep on passing link juice back and forth, but is there real harm in following external links?

These would be links our writers and editors created themselves to reputable sources, blogs, etc.