We all know any active website changes a lot over time. You remove pages, rename pages and add pages. However adding pages is never a problem for visitors or search engines, but I am not quite sure what is a good guideline to follow when it comes to removing and renaming pages.

Last year we changed the extension of our pages from .htm to .php. We implemented the proper redirects and links from the old pages to the new ones. Once the search engines picked up the new pages and indexed them, we removed the old ones. However I recently studied our error log and found that we still receive several queries a day for our old pages, including pages that had been removed on previous occasions (like products, articles and information we no longer publish on our site).

My question is, how long should you keep the old page on your site before removing it. What I actually mean by saying 'old page' I do not imply an exact copy of a page, located under a new name elsewhere on our site, because that will raise duplicate content concerns. These old pages only include a 301 redirect, or where 301 redirect is not possible a meta refresh tag and in all cases a notification on the page containing links about the new location.

We will be looking at upgrading our hosting package to make use of custom error documents, but in the meantime we want to upload some of the pages that we removed in the past, each consisting only of a notification that the page had been removed and supplying a link to our homepage. Some of these pages are no longer relevant to our website, so is there any sense in uploading a notification about these pages also, because that may lead to un-targeted traffic and we do not want the search engines to see it as spam. On the other hand, who says these visitors will be un-targeted, they might see something interesting on our homepage and convert into a customer.