Prevent old versions of files from remaining accessible

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I have a site with many documents in PDF format, linked from the html part of my site. If I upload a revised version of such a PDF document, concrete puts it somewhere in files/nnnn/mmmm/pppp/filename.pdf (with numbers replacing the 'nnnn' etc. sequences). It then updates the link visible on my web site.

However, google and other search engines remember the files/nnnn/mmmm/pppp/filename.pdf name of the old version if they have indexed it. As a result, google can still send customers to the old version, even though it is no longer linked from my site.

Is there any way to avoid this? I would like old versions to remain on disk, but no longer accessible for outside viewers, i.e. I would like that the links which google remembers for the old versions simply redirect to the new version, or at least produce a 404 Not Found.

(I tried simply deleting those old versions, and ran into a bug that concrete does not actually remove those files from disk, but that is a different issue; I would like to keep the old versions anyway).

Thanks!

Kasper

 
robodev replied on at Permalink Reply
Am not 100% sure, but if you reindexed your site, then request Google to crawl it, would that help?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en...

Within the dashboard, there is the big red button that says "clear search index"

Not sure whether clearing website cache may help a bit as well.