If your sites are now clean, and the visitor is not damaged by the listings, I'd leave well alone, and wait for them to drop out of the index.

I'd be surprised if they will hurt anyone now, so I wouldn't recommend drawing attention to them ... unless there's folk here who say different! :)

Well, will they ever go away? They don't bring a 404. Plus if one of my competitors runs a site command, it is obvious that they are there, even though I turned off and removed this cloaking thing. The cloaked pages remain. I would like to get rid of them somehow.

Can't you just delete them?

they are not real pages. they just appear to be pages. when you run a site command, they are indexed, you click on them and they go to the homepage. isn't that what cloaking is?

I want to get them out of the site command. Maybe I am not explaining myself :-)

You could go to Google and request a removal - but it strikes me that might be a high risk strategy.

I'm not clear why you are concerned; they seem to be doing no harm, and if they only appear on webmaster searches, there's no lkelihood of visitor confusion.

You say there's no active cloaking going on, just these 'ghost' urls from the past; Why the concern?

That's correct, they are just "ghost" URLS and the cloaking has been removed. My concern is that they show up (on a site: command) and if someone sees them (like a competitor) they could report me and I could have problems. I know this is the risk one takes when they implement risky strategies but I was just really playing around with it and I didn't think the ghost URLs would stay out there so long after I removed the thing. I would like to promote the website in a white hat way now.

You can't use the google URL removal tool if the pages don't bring a 404 when clicked on. That's part of the instructions.

It may be worth searching for the URLs in Yahoo; the thing about Google ghosts (and I'm aware that I'm generalizing here), is that if there is but one link to them anywhere, and they *don't* produce a 404, then Google will not drop them. If there is no link to them, sooner or later they'll fall out, and you'll just need to be patient.

From what you've said, it would take a a fairly persistent, determined and obsessive rival to even find them - though I'm aware such people exist - would they be able to make a federal case out of it? I doubt it.

Even if they try, I've never, ever heard of Google penalizing someone for cleaning up their site - even from people who've dedicated their lives to Google-bashing (such people seem to exist),so I'd really not worry too much. :)