On December 7, 2018 at 06:18, thecapnredfish said...
Say a site removed their forum. You can go to the site and view other things like articles. Even the link to forum is gone. So you google something and it comes up with one of the threads, even displays the text. You click on it and it takes you to 404 page not found. Where did google find the info and was still able to send you to the correct website even though the forum is gone. When I say gone. The website(magazine) still exist however the owner even wrote a message the forum has been removed on its homepage as a short article listed with usual news and what’s happening.
There are a couple of different scenarios.
1. Because the information is still on the website, and Google crawled the site, so they know it exists. But they removed the forum functionality, so you (public) simply cannot access it anymore.
2. They removed the information (Which would be dumb) and Google simply hasn't recrawled the entire site yet. Hopefully they didn't do it this way.
There's a lot more to this (like why you don't want 404's on your site)..
But that's it in a nutshell.
