remove old content from google... best solution?

[foxay]

I have a site that was spidered by google about a year ago. I did a redesign and changed the whole directory structure. Google didn't remove many dead links from its servers so now my site is returning a lot of 404's to visitors that come from google. I've tried to remove the old pages from google (by using the manual removal thing and by disallowing access to some directories which no longer exist using robots.txt) but nothing has worked.Is there any effective way of removing old content from google?If there's no easy solution, I'll just redirect people (301) who try to access the old pages to the new index or to the new URIs for each of the old pages. Will Google penalize this?I recommend using a custom 404 page.I have one that has a small menu on it Bompacustom 404 pages really helps.What is "custom 404 pages"?Give me example also............i_am_dhaval wrote:What about sending an email to [email protected] as they suggest at http://preg.org/collectibles/mentalplex/remove.html? Has anyone tried that? I have the same problem.