: How does removing pages from a site affect Google SEO? I have been told by one of my clients that Google must be notified if you intend to remove pages (e.g. discontinued product pages) from

@Kimberly868

Form Google Webmasters Tools you should upload the new sitemap, without those pages.

There is a form there too that tells Google to not index those pages and will not been visited by the bots.

The perfect case is that those pages are 301 redirected to the similar categories.

Offcourse, you could tell to the bots from robots.txt to stop visiting URLs you named there.

There is no penalty for that - so far as i know - the only one ist that those products will not appear in SERPs anymore.

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@Angela700

Providing the handling of the removal of pages has been carried out appropriately, then there are no negative repercussions from this, as @John Conde states.

Removing key pages on your website (or changing the URL of them) that carry out authority and pass significant weight to other pages without 301 redirecting them or ensuring any authority/weight is maintained on a publicly accessible page on your website can, of course, result in a negative effect in how your website performs (ranks) in search.

But in the example you specified (discontinued product pages), if those pages don't possess any real weight, and you have no plans to reintroduce these products as a later date, then simply serving a 404 response for these pages is the most practical way of handling these. Better still, you could customize your 404 error page to cater for the visitors that may land on this page.

Furthermore, if you need to remove these pages from Google's index quickly and manually (in the event that there are links that point to these discontinued product pages), then you can request the removal of these pages in Google within Google Webmaster Tools (which one can only imagine, is what your client was trying to get at).

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