: This sounds like Googlebot is no longer able to find your pages. If a page is still on your site, Google won't remove it from the index, but if many pages are returning 404 errors then

@Cofer257

This sounds like Googlebot is no longer able to find your pages. If a page is still on your site, Google won't remove it from the index, but if many pages are returning 404 errors then they would generally be removed. In Webmaster Tools, check the "fetch as Googlebot" tool on some of your pages.

Duplicate content on the same site (e.g. the URLs page.html and page.html?x=nothing) may be ignored/removed but duplicate content across multiple sites (e.g. if you copied content from Wikipedia) would never be removed from the index per se, it simply will not rank anywhere.

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