How to remove old urls completely

[melworks]

Hi

I want to completely remove the old urls (not redirect them).

I have an old url which is being redirected to a new URL. I want this stopped so basically if someone clicked on the URL, it should just give a 404 type of error.

How do I do this? I only want to do this for a handful of URLs.

Thanks

[melworks]

I am thinking is there a 'reference" data stored somewhere where the old urls are translated into new ones?

If I can perhaps delete this data for a particular url, then the redirect might not work.

[new_seo]

To be honest, I am little surprised to see that you want to remove the old pages in spite of redirection. Generally it is being suggested to redirect the Old pages to the new one to get the link juice of the old one.

May be you have some valid reason to delete the old pages completely. The process is very simple, just remove those old pages from your server and set up a customized 404 error page.

[melworks]

May be you have some valid reason to delete the old pages completely.

Thanks new_seo. Yes my reasons are "legal' related. I have been asked by lawyers due to infringement violations (fair enough).

How do I remove them from the server?

[Skip Hire]

How do I remove them from the server?

How did you get them there in the first place? FTP I am guessing in which case use your FTP client to browse to the files and remove them, then replace with a 404 page.

[ClickyB]

How did you get them there in the first place? FTP I am guessing in which case use your FTP client to browse to the files and remove them, then replace with a 404 page.

This is not correct (see reasons above)!


@melworks: You want to remove the redirects, not the destination url's right?

If you are hosted on Apache, the redirects will probably be set up in your .htaccess file in your domain root. (If not, tell me what type of server you are using and check to see if there are in fact files with those old urls... it's just possible that somebody set up "on-page redirects")!

To remove the redirects (on Apache) you access the .htaccess file (via FTP OR your sever control panel) and look for lines which look like this:

redirect 301 /old-url.php http://www.yourdomain.com/new-url.php

Delete those lines from your .htaccess file and save it... and that's it.

[SeoKungFu]

Anything that will "produce" 404 ( not found ) reply from the pages will deindex them:
- removing redirects and/or pages themselves
- creating a header response that returns 404 not found reply no matter what is next in the body
- some even more complicated trick if you love more complicated solutions that ends up to returning the aforementioned code for a page that "does not exist" anymore, thus must be removed from SE index

[jonybro]

Can you share b here why you want to do this.. why yo want to remove the existing URLs are you not like to get the advantage of them or you want to change them ..
If you want to change them...
Then you can edit them or if you want to completely remove them for this you can use re direction code....

[vingler]

You copied the content to a new site? are the pages similar? then you have to 301 redirect old page to closest new page and delete the content on the old pages.

Do a new sitemap for the new site.