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crawling errors on non existing pages


Last year I bought a domain name and started blogging here :

http://www.lengrand.fr/

As a french guy, I wanted my website to be bilingual and used qtranslate for some time. But I quickly realized that it was better writing more articles than spend loads of time translating the same articles. . . My blog is english only for the last 6 months now. What I did was simply disable qtranslate and remove any special stuff.

My problem is that google keep trying to crawl my french pages, and I always have a lot of 404 on pages that do not exist any more. Here are some examples.

fr/tag/adblocker/ 404 14/04/12 fr/category/tips/ 404 02/04/12 fr/ 404 22/02/12 fr/tag/language/ 404 03/04/12

Question is, how can I be sure to remove all those pages from the index ?

Thank you for your help


Solution

  • Create or edit your .htaccess file and add the following.

    redirect 301 /fr/ http://www.lengrand.fr/
    

    This should update the search engine's results so they now know the folder /fr/ doesn't exist anymore and they try to find the article without /fr/

    So if someone would go to http://www.lengrand.fr/fr/category/tips/ it will directly go to http://www.lengrand.fr/category/tips/ without delay and tell the search engine the page has move to that new url.