Removing Previous & Next Links

Howdy,
As the subject says, looking for some assistance with previous & next links on GD entries. I’ve trawled the forum posts here, and some Google searching, but come up empty.

We’re doing a big cleanup on a client’s site; their GD setup has approx 2200 entries. A large chunk of them, however, are causing 404 errors due to the previous & next links pointing to entries that no longer exist.

To my mind, the questions I need answers/ fixes to are:

a) Why do these current entries not update the prev/ next links when the old entries were removed? How do I force them to update? (Yep, we’ve checked site caching and also republishing the entry – no dice).

b) If I can’t resolve the above, I need to filter those links from appearing in the first place (not with “display:none”, that’s already in place, the link is still in the source code of the entry and crawlable by search engine bots, hence the 404s.)

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong place, I’m brand new to this plugin. If it helps, the only add-ons installed are Advance Search Filters & Payment Manager

Thanks for your help!