Cleanup of nonexistent pages

As you all know, when one tries to load a nonexistent page either deliberately through a redlink or through misspelling the URL, the site creates the page from scratch and puts on that placeholder "We don't have a page named..." text.

Would it be possible/desirable for the technical staff to implement a script or something that periodically auto-purges such nonexistent pages from the site so that they don't clutter up search results anymore? Something like...

• Check if page has been edited since its creation.
• If not, check if it has the placeholder text.
• If it has, delete the page.

Not a big issue, I know. But it might ease up on the two major things every website needs to keep in check: server load and user annoyance.

That surprises me. I thought those pages still do not exist. They should be generated on the fly from a canned template. Search engines will see them either way when they spider malformed links. They should be stopped with a properly configured robots.txt or something.

Also, that sounds like a wishlist item. Send to Query Wishlist. This subforum is being retired.

edited 17th Mar '16 1:11:52 PM by war877

Those articles indeed should not exist, even if Google Search occasionally thinks they do. The new site configuration should be returning an HTTP code that stops them from being indexed.