Obsolete pages damage SE listings??

[processor]

I am in process of big re-organisations of my site http://supercivilisation.net and want to do things right by the SEs.

I'm currently attempting to add h1 tags, meta keywords, descriptions, titles, alt tags, link tags, etc.

I'm also shifting the locations and changing the names of some of the pages and then uploading again. Obviously the SEs don't know where these are yet until they crawl.

So they are also going to pick up my old pages as well as the revised one's, as I don't want to delete the old pages as many are listed on the SEs.

Will the SEs simply drop the old pages in time as they are not modified?

Is there any danger of having the old pages still on-line and with other pages that are quite similar or even identical, except in another location on my site?

thank you

WhiteRabbit

[flood6]

To make sure the SEs find your new pages, disregard the old, and don't penalize you, you'll need to do a permanant redirect from the obsolete pages to their newer replacements.

Here's a google search for "301 redirect tutorial". There are several good resources there.

Good luck.

[Andilinks]

I have a similar question, but there is a difference. I have 18 pages on my site that I consider obsolete and I want to simply eliminate them and not replace them with anything.

But even though they haven't been updated or linked to other pages on my site for over 60 days they still get traffic from search engines. These 18 pages all still have a PR4 while newer, more important pages are PR0 and are getting more traffic.

Would a redirect 301 to a replacement page that has content NOTHING LIKE the old page (but is good content) be penalized? Why not a meta tag forward with no delay to index.htm, since the old content is not replaced at all but I'd like the visitor to see the site and not get a 404 error?

I've posted a notice on those pages that they will be eliminated on 10/5/04 but I'm sure the SE's will continue sending people there after that.

Andi

[achronister]

A 301 redirect to a page with completely different content will not trigger a penalty, it just might confuse visitors.

A meta refresh with no delay is a spam signal that might be bad, I would not do that option.

A third option would be a 10 second delay meta refresh with the 'this page no longer exists, please take a look at our newest resources' or something similiar.

[Andilinks]

Hi Aaron.

Maybe I'll make up a special page similar to my home page to receive all the 301 redirects. It will explain the change and invite visitors to explore the rest of the site.

I still have 12 days to decide. Many of those "visitors" are just wasteful bots which is why I want to delete those big old pages, but not lose the real people either.

Thanks!

Andi

[achronister]

That another good idea, I would go with that. With the 301 you'll retain the PR value of the old pages so it will pass that value on to your regular pages and will still be user friendly.

[satcure]

I had a similar problem with information on a web site that I wanted to convert to an eBook for selling. To maintain the relevancy for the search engines, I scrambled most of the content by using BBedit to sort every line into alphabetical order. At the top of the page I put a note to explain that the content was now for sale in the form of an eBook.

You are right never to delete a page. I've spent years getting a good PR and I'm not going to throw away pages that have a top ranking!

Pages which are now just plain obsolete, I put Google "Adsense" code in, so they earn me money that way.

[ritaperdue]

If I may through my 2 cents in...I have an e-commerce site with various products on a variety of pages. At first, when I decided I didn't want to carry a particular group of items anymore, I just made a new page and deleted the old. The old had a PR of 4 and the new had a PR of 0 until it got spidered again or whenever it is they do that. NOW, rather than delete the old, I just replace the content on that page. It keeps the spiders coming back to see what's changed and it keeps me in the search engines and my ranking on that pages doesn't go down. Of course I'm talking about changing products and themes and categories, as well as keywords and metatags, etc. So that's what I would do - just put your new content on the old page. Of course I keep adding new pages too.

[rlrouse]

I have a suggestion...

Half the battle that a webmaster faces is getting pages indexed and ranked in Google. Why not take advantage of the fact that you have a bunch of pages already indexed?

If it were me in your position, I would add new, appropriate content to the old pages and simply create brand new pages for the revised old content. That way you don't lose any search engine rankings, you just gain more in the end.

I NEVER, EVER, under any circumstances remove a page that it already indexed in Google. I simply change the content on the existing pages, add new pages for any revised content, and move on.

Again, just a suggestion...

[amabaie]

Another option is to simply get rid of the 18 pages and allow a 404 error ...BUT, do up a custom 404 page.

Check out my Custom 404 page. I could have juist copied the home page code onto this page, but that would have gotten stale after a while.

[rlrouse]

Another option is to simply get rid of the 18 pages and allow a 404 error ...BUT, do up a custom 404 page.

Yes, you can do this, but you will lose the rankings for those 18 pages (they'll drop from the index) resulting in the loss of the traffic from those rankings.

[DrTandem1]

Since the 18 pages are obsolete, you should no longer care, if they receive traffic. Pointing them to unrelated content using 301 redirect will not hurt your rankings.

How the obsolete pages received the traffic in the first place should be investigated. Then, use a similar technique for the newer pages.

The way I do this is using a meta refresh tag pointing to the newer pages, but I also include a noindex, nofollow tag to avoid being penalized for this type of redirect. After a time, I elimnate the old pages and yes, I use a custom 404 error page as well.

[rlrouse]

Pointing them to unrelated content using 301 redirect will not hurt your rankings.

This is true, but the old pages will eventually be dropped from the index. Changing the content on the old pages and adding new pages with the revised content gives you the best of both worlds: your existing pages are still indexed and your new ones will be indexed as well, very soon in fact.

My point is that Google loves lots of content. IMO adding new pages is better overall than simply replacing old ones. In this case, instead of 18 pages there will be 36, which means twice as many ways for visitors to find the site via Google.

[Bluevoodu]

Honestly.... does having "old" webpages on your site take your rankings down?

Lets say you have an old "analysis" or maybe a "news story". Is it bad to leave them up if they are getting low page views?

My point is that Google loves lots of content. IMO adding new pages is better overall than simply replacing old ones. In this case, instead of 18 pages there will be 36, which means twice as many ways for visitors to find the site via Google.

I think that answers the question... except will lower ranks result from low page views for older pages?

†B†V†

[osnet]

I would use mod_rewrite Proxy redirect's to cover the obsolete pages - then send them to the index.

IMO this wouldn't violate googles policy on cloaking - but it would be more approriate if the index is related to the topic of the obsolete pages.

Cheers!
-John

[Andilinks]

Lets say you have an old "analysis" or maybe a "news story". Is it bad to leave them up if they are getting low page views?

The 18 pages in question are huge alphabetical lists of links, with 600-800 links on each page. I'm not updating the lists so link-rot is setting in and what is worse they seem to be bot-magnets and attract many that don't have any connection to search engines or do any good for my site, yet they repeatedly return and waste bandwidth sometimes downloading the same pages several times a day. I'm not sure what their purpose is but it is not the service I had intended to provide when I created the pages. I have banned many but it seems better just to remove the pages.

Using these same old URLs for new content is a good possibility. The PR would probably maintain though it would not take long for the Google index to reflect the new content.

I have not had much experience with mod_rewrite, but what I have is not good, it seems very difficult.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

Andi

[TN Todd]

I prefer the custom 404 page option used in conjunction with a non-redirecting "this page has moved page". Include a static link to the old page pointing to the new page and leave this page up for a few months. I have never had a problem with this method and seems to help google find the new content farily quickly.

[mccreath]

I have developed a custom 404 page that analysis the url and other request variables to determine where to redirect (301) the user.

The logic is kept in a data file (xml) so I can easily update these "mappings" as I find the need.

I developed this because the site I inherrited had already gone through several re-writes, where the old pages were the ones indexed in all the search engines. There were over 1000 obsolete pages indexed when I started.

[espectations]

I recently inherited a site that was designed in frames by another developer.

They did not add no-index tags and as a result the frames were actually crawled. Anyway, not to loose those pages, I just named the new tabled pages the same.

To remove the cached pages from Google, I signed up and used the following to remove the pages from Google: http://www.google.com/remove.html

That works for Google but necessarily for the other bots. For other bots I would suggest you do as suggested in these posts - either redirect or a robots.txt file or custom made error 404 page.

The big question would be whether or not you wish to maintain that specific page in which case you replace the content or get rid of it completely.

[webmasterjunkie]

I have confirmation pages after forms that use META refresh with 1 sec delay, that keeps me in the graces of the search engines right? Right? Oh gosh, please tell me I'm right.