Google is still crawling and indexing my old, dummy, test pages which now are 404 not found
- by Ace
I have set up my site with sample pages and data (lorem ipsum, etc..) and Google has crawled these pages. I deleted all these pages and actually added real content but in webmaster tools, i still get a lot of 404 errors Google trying to crawl these pages. I have set them to "mark as resolved" but some pages still come back as 404.
Furthermore, I have a lot of these sample pages still listed when i do a search of my site on Google. How to remove them. I think these irrelevant pages are hurting my rating.
I actually wanted to erase all these pages and start getting my site being being indexed as a new one but I read it's not possible? (I have submitted a sitemap and used "Fetch as Google.")