Problem: I just rebuilt a site on wordpress that had been previously hosted elsewhere and built in static html. The old site was showing up in search results above the new site I had just created on wordpress.
Short Term Solution: Once the domain had been transferred to our hosting account, I set up a mirror in my dreamhost account so that the old site would show the new site. This allowed me to hold on to some of the old traffic from the previous search engine rankings. Still, I had the about page of the old site ranking high in results and it was redirecting to a 404 not found page.
After contacting dreamhost, I learned that the short term solution to that problem was to create a file called about.html and place it in the root directory of the new site. That way, when someone clicked on that link in google to mydomain.com/about.html, it loaded the new about.html file instead of the 404 not found error.
What I wanted to do then was to have the link to the old about page lead to the about page on the new site. To do that, dreamhost directed me to a page describing how to create a meta-redirect and instructed me to place it in the head of the about.html file that I put in the root directory of my site (via FTP).
While this was a good short term solution, I still didn't have control over the meta description of the About Page, which is not what I wanted to be appearing as the number 2 result for my keyword in Google! So, I went looking for a longer term solution. I went to google webmaster tools' removals page and I entered the URL of the old page that was coming up.
I've submitted the URL and my removal request is still pending. I will keep you all informed as to how long it takes for this process to complete
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