How to delete web pages without affecting your search rankings

In my recent blog migration, I had to make decisions on how to guide my site’s visitors from the old pages to the new URLs generated by the new blog system. These “visitors” I just mentioned also include search engine spiders. When you redesign any portion of your site, think twice before deleting the old files and folders from your web server.

Consider these cases:

1. Users may have bookmarked one or more of your pages and intend on returning.
2. Search engines have indexed of all of the pages on your site and intend on returning multiple times to those URLs directly. Once the spiders visit those pages and get a 404 error, they consider the pages gone and discard the pages from the index.
3. Search engines are refering users to your old URLs.
4. Users may have subscribed to at least one of your RSS feeds.
5. Users may have memorized a URL and visit by manually typing that URL.

In business, many people are concerned with cases 2 and 3. With case 2, you should consider it a waste to have to wait on the search engines to reindex your new URLs when the old ones had already been indexed. With case 3, you are kissing search engine users goodbye for at least six months. Think about the last time you searched for something and received a “Page Not Found” after clicking on one of the results. You clicked the back button and looked at the other results, right? This is not abnormal behavior.

So how do you lead everyone to the new content when they are using your old URLs? With 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect stands for “Moved Permanently.” It has the ability to specify where the page has moved so that the content consumer can handle the transition. A search spider sees a 301 redirect and thinks, “delete this page from the index but index the new page in its place.” The search system will assign the old page’s PageRank to the new page. A user’s browser immediately redirects the user to the new page. Everyone is happy, including yourself.

To do this using a programming language, look it up in Google. It can also be set up in your content management system or web server as well, on a per file basis (especially useful for static HTML pages and assets like images and PDFs).

Oh yeah, and this works on dynamic pages as well. http://www.example.com/?id=5 can be redirected to http://www.example.com/newpage?id=5, for example. Of course, that method takes some minor programming on your old dynamic pages, but it is well worth the effort. Hey, the reason why you have dynamic pages is so you have to manage less code, right? Don’t be lazy, and take advantage of that benefit!

So you want to keep your web files tidy with your redesign? Unfortunately, you could be shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to search result rankings, and you could end up angering some of your users who rely on bookmarks. Don’t make this lazy mistake.