I started weeding through my site's search results from Google today, using a site: search, to determine if there are any links that cause 404s and thus need redirecting. To my amazement I noticed numerous https:// results relating to various pages. My site doesn't have a SSL certificate, doesn't serve such pages, doesn't internally link to https:// pages, doesn't include any such files in its sitemap.xml and, for all of these, never has.

I decided to do a Google search for https://<my site> and found one site that incorrectly refers to the root of my site with a https:// prefix - I will try to contact them to get them to correct this.

I'm not sure however how Googlebot managed to index the non-root files as https://. I can't find any external links to them and surely, without certification, Googlebot should have stalled at the first request?

I've just added the following lines to the site's .htaccess (although the surfer still has to navigate through the browser's "This site is a security risk. Abandon hope all ye who enter here!" message(s) first to get there):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.<my site>.org/$1 [R=301,L]

• replacing <my site> with my domain name.

My big question is this though - I would like to use the Google Webmaster Tools Remove URLs feature to remove the https:// pages from the index. Can I be guaranteed that this will only remove the https:// versions of each relevant page and not the valid http:// versions?

My thanks to anyone who can help me out with this particular question and the issue in general.