Hi Neil, Are you sure search engines are hitting those 410 pages? I have found that when you removee all links to the old site, the search engines have no way of visiting the old URLs anymore - meaning they never get to see your 301, and never get to see the 410.
My solution to that is to create a list of all the deleted pages that search engines have in their index (scrape the search engine index for this), and link to them somewhere - linking to your deleted pages in the XML sitemap is a good idea, or create a 'deleted pages' page on your site and discreetly link to it. Search engines follow your links, see the 301, see the 410, then remove the page from the index. That's the theory anyway. If you are saying that MSN is following your 301 and actually hitting the 410, then not removing the page from the index, that does seem odd. Harvey. Neil Bertram wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm stuck with a wee search engine problem. I have a site that was once > on domain x, with old-fashioned URLs, and is now on domain y with nice > semantic URLs. The content on the new site is largely different, but > there's a PHP-based lookup of the old URL patterns that will redirect > people to an equivalent page (where one exists) on the new site with a > 301 redirect. > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
