Can you remove previously indexed product pages from Google's index?

[byoung85]

Hi all,

 

I've recently taken over an e-commerce project website from someone to build it. I'm quite new to SEO, so I wanted to hear some expert suggestions.

 

Here's the deal.

 

The previous owner of the site had uploaded ~2000 products, and the corresponding URL's of every pages have been indexed by Google according to webmaster tool (I've attached the screenshot).

 

 

He then did a fresh install of Prestashop before handing over the project to me (yikes...!), so all of the indexed product pages no longer exist.

 

Question #1) Would this return a 404 on all of the removed pages?

 

After doing some research, I figured I'd have to either:

1. Set-up a canonicalization to redirect all of the broken links to their correct pages (I know I'll have to upload all the products again.
   
2. Submit a URL removal request will only remove the URL for 90 days (according to Google).
   

I don't have any products uploaded, for the site is currently going some layout changes.

 

Question #2) What is the best course of action to take to improve the site's SEO? Any other suggestions?

 

 

Please help!

[Optimus_Sam]

Hi Byoung85, what's the url of your website?

[cnnedogawa]

Hi byoung85,

To prevent 404 error pages, you can add new tag with slug url same as removed link. You can visit site:<yoursitename> to see all indexed links of your website.

Hope it helpful.

[vekia]

you can also block urls with robots.txt file