Dealing with previously indexed (Google Search Console) that are now unpublished

Well, you don’t want to set up redirects for unpublished pages if you want the pages to be removed from Google index. As far as I know, the only way to have Google remove a page from their index is to let the bots hit a 404 enough times for them to be sure the page is really gone. I don’t know how long this takes, I just know that they won’t remove the page the first time they hit a 404 (in case the situation is temporary), and they won’t remove the page if they get a redirect instead of a 404. My gut tells me you have a redirect(s) set up somewhere and that some part of the redirect is causing the 500s.

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