How to get rid of unwanted Web site pages

If you have a lot of out-dated content on your site then you are one of thousands of companies with the same problem. You probably want to delete the content but stop, search and think about how that strategy will affect your page rank.

For those companies that have ecommerce, your ecommerce software may have the option to keep the product page online but update the contents of that page to remove the option to purchase the product. Below, I’ll walk through the different options you have to handle out of date content but the latter option above is probably the best strategy.

Delete the pages

At first you would think this is the obvious answer. Who cares if a page is deleted, right? It’s just 50 pages out of the 20,000 pages I have on my site… But when you delete one page or a thousand, this confuses the search engine spiders and the rank your site holds in search engines can be affected for the worse.

Bottom line – deleting pages is the worst strategy you can do to your Web site. There are other options that will affect your search engine ranking less.

Redirect the pages

There are multiple strategies to handle out-of-date content. One is to redirect the page, and there are multiple redirect options (404, 301 error pages, etc.). Google Webmaster has a nice description of each option. But you must be careful on which redirect you choose – one may affect your page view more than the others and each search engine has different ‘rules’ you must complete in order to redirect the page(s) successfully.

For example, for a 301 redirect (this option is used if a site is moved to a new domain, people access one page via different URLs or if two Web sites merged), Google requires the user to submit a request to remove the cache via its public URL removal tool or through its Webmaster Tools URL removal tool. You can also wait until Google recrawls your site but this could take up to 6 months depending on the popularity of your site.

Bottom line – use redirects sparingly. Search engines, such as Google, have said that a mass redirect sends a warning to search engines and may result with a downgraded SER.

Replace old content with updated content

Another option is to replace the old content and replacing with new content. The positive aspect for this strategy is no articles are deleted, but the negative aspect for this strategy is the content is still changed. Deleting the content on an article is just as bad as deleting the entire article – it confuses the search engine and will result in a decreased SER. The same problem will result if a page’s Title or meta description is changed.

Another option is to add new content – like an updated message – above the old content. Adding content is preferred by search engines instead of deleting content. A short sentence can tell the Internet user about the current state of the content on that page, and over time the page views for that particular page will decrease.

Bottom line – Updating an older page is the best thing you can do to promote new content status, and adding a short message above the existing content is a tactic to carry out this strategy.