How to stop Google indexing old html pages?

[GAViN™©]

Quick and simple...

If you look at this page here
you can see that google still have indexed our old page for the HD7814 coffee machine.

So, i have added a redirect 301 on our .htaccess file to redirect that hd7814.html page to the new page.

What steps do I need to take in order to stop Google indexing this page completely, and, so that it wont feature in google webmaster tools either under the category "page not found" list?

Remembering that the hd7814.html file no longer exists as an html page anymore.

The reason I ask this, is because i have a lot of pages that need this to be done as well, and want to make sure I am doing this the correct way for SEO.

Also,

Am starting to get a lot of duplicate meta descriptions for the old html page (hd7814.html) and the new html appearing in Google Webmaster Tools...

What do i need to do to stop this from happening?



Thanks.

[Duncan Rounding]

Time will heal all - don't expect immediate results. Google will update the indexing in time.

When you remove a page and are concerned about the cached index then use a temporary redirect or better still just let it go to a custom 404 page. It is more important that you send your visitors to somewhere constructive on your site than worrying about the Google indexing - let Google worry about that.

[leehack]

Explore webmaster tools and you should find an area where you can tell them to no longer show certain pages (usually the 404's) in their index. They often get removed within 5 days IME.

[pinbrook]

The easiest way is to ensure you have deleted all old pages from the webspace and simply use htaccess for a 404 error

ie forward all 404 errors to acatalog/index

this is an easy failsafe that will put your customers somewhere, you can use this as a 2nd line of defence for pages deleted that don't have a 301.

Personally I never bother with 301s, when i know we've deleted loads of pages, i go to the webspace and delete all html pages, and follow this with a refresh.

[GAViN™©]

Seems as good an idea as any Jo.

Do you know the line of code I need to use in the .htaccess file
to redirect to the homepage?

[completerookie]

take a look at http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php with some excellent tips and tricks for .htaccess

in this, you can add a line for the old-url to be redirected to the home page, or tell google to remove the old-url from its index and so on and so on.

There is so much in there to do what you want.

alternatively try http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/mo...-files-to-html
and also an excellent forum