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We decided to go with a 410 for those deleted items, some of which were up to 5 years old!. They had all gone within a couple of days. The more recent out of stock or deleted products we're 301ing back to the main category page.

Thanks to all for their responses.

We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products.

We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty.

But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google?

We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this?

Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid.

I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task.

Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.