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Originally Posted by netabilitysue
Please notice that you have other sources of traffic and visitors in addition to search engines:
What about all those bookmarks/favorites set by previous visitors?
What about those e-mailed URL's to check out this great site?
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Originally Posted by wige
Customers, on the other hand, hate landing on an error message, and if there is a chance that an old forgotten link somewhere on the web could take the user to a non-existent page, they should see a friendly error message that gives a link to the correct place or even better an invisible redirect.
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My point exactly. The links from articles you wrote, that got syndicated with the old link, directory listings or link exchanges with websites who do not respond to requests to update the link, discussions on forums or blogs containing one of your old links, all made me realise that I need to keep these pages up and running, not for the sake of search engines, but for the sake of visitors. I am a bit concerned about loosing page rank, but hell, you can always try to improve your page rank later on, but you cannot regain lost traffic due to an unfriendly "Page Not Found" error, a page that could have cost you a client.
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Originally Posted by wige
I have had a few pages redirected with 301s keep getting spidered because a certain search engine never updates their index, and others where I was unable to get a link to the old URL changed.
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Like MSN
(and a couple of our local search engines here in South Africa)
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Originally Posted by incrediblehelp
Did you remove the 301 redirects along with the old pages? If so put them back.
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Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)
But do the redirects using the .htaccess file in stead of some code in the pages.
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Here is the code I'm currently using:
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newurl.com/newpage.php");
It seems like a lot of people prefer redirects via .htaccess instead of using a script within the page. I will keep that in mind, thanks for the tip.
So it seems pretty clear, I should keep those redirects up, thanks for the replies.