removal of unused pages on webserver

[Gareth Wanklin]

I have an number of pages on the webserver that are outdated and dont exist in sellerdeck any more. however carrying out a website refresh and or purge and refresh does not remove them from my server.

consequently i have pages such as Here

Where there is no style etc. The issue is that google can still see these pages and are logging indexing them and any issues in WMT/search console.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[meden]

All you can do is access the site folder on the server (using an FTP client if you don't have direct access through your hosting control panel) and manually delete all the html files then do a refresh.

[Gareth Wanklin]

I was really hoping that wasn't going to be the answer. seems odd that the purge and refresh doesn't rectify this.

[NormanRouxel]

Mick's answer is essentially what a Purge and Refresh does (or should do) but you'll definitely have full control and will be able to see that your acatalog folder is empty before doing the Refresh.

If orphan files turn up after the manual delete and Refresh that will indicate that something else is wrong.

[Gareth Wanklin]

Ok so will have to make a backup of the store folder on the webserver. at least if i have to put the files back i will still have them

[graphicz]

If you have ftp access but you dont want to delete files, add the redundant page names to a robots.txt file to stop them being indexed.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /unwanted.html

And/or create a 'no longer present page and write some 301's into htaccess

Redirect 301 /unwanted.html http://www.yoursite.com/no-longer-present.html

[NormanRouxel]

If you have plenty of disk space on your server then renaming acatalog and creating a new one before doing the Refresh will suffice. Renamed acatalog can be deleted once you know all ia well.