Some of our pages were moved to new URLs (renamed and under new
navigation branch) and we implemented 301 redirects for the old urls
pointing them to the new ones. But now, the GSA (5.2x) still has the
old URLs in the index and in the search results. From the docs, the
GSA needs to see a 404 to remove a URL from its index and not serve
it.

This sounds like a stretch, but is there a way to send a 404 to the
GSA but a 301 to the end-user's browser? Mm ... starting to sound more
like an Apache question ... but any ideas? Any creative ways  you've
dealt with such situations?

Many thanks!

KM

Hi,

One suggestion would be to temporarily (or permanently, your choice)
enter a pattern in your Do Not Crawl list that encompasses the "old
urls" you mention.  Give this 20-30 minutes to remove the old urls
from the index, then you can remove that Do Not Crawl entry if you
wish.

If your content is driven by metadata-and-url feed by chance, then you
could submit a feed with the identified "action" column containing
"delete", which will also remove these URLs from your index.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff, adding the URLs temporarily to Do Not Crawl worked
beautifully.

KM