John Mueller of Google said it is a good idea to remove the URLs of pages you remove from your web site from your XML Sitemap file. He said “if you remove or change a lot of pages on your site, it’s good to reflect that in a sitemap file.”

He said this on Twitter “If you remove or change a lot of pages on your site, it’s good to reflect that in a sitemap file, but in general, it usually takes a bit of time for our systems to recognize that and to reflect it in the search results. That’s normal.”

It is common sense – I mean, why send Google to URLs and pages that no longer return any content? But if you need Google to tell you that, here it is.

Forum discussion at Twitter.