301: Delete old page, or keep?
-
Hey everybody!
So, for those who have followed some of my posts I have myself in a bit of a quagmire that I am not going to get into. Some solutions have come to light and others are still pending and I will update my past questions with solutions!
On the safer side of things I have a new situation. As I am going through our pages we have three different pages for "Admissions"
-
Admissions
-
Admission Guidelines
-
Admission Information
The "admissions' page has no link or feed to the other admissions page, and actually has no content on it at all. The "Admission Guidelines" page feeds to the "admission information" page, which although is extremely redundant is a different project for a different day.
I am planning on putting a 301 on the "admissions" page and sending it to the "admission guidelines" page. When I do so, should I delete the old page? Does it matter? Is there a pro or con for either?
Thanks guys!
-
-
That was my thought! Just double checking. And yea that occurred to me this morning. Especially since I am using a CMS there are so extra domains from the tags!!!
-
301 Redirect and forget it. The only other thing to watch for is if the "admissions" page has multiple versions or URLs. If it has a login function, or is in a CMS I would double check for duplicate or alternate versions of that page.
The 301 redirect is the fast way to get rid of a page. The slow way that actually deletes it from Google and their index is to do a URL removal, and add a 410 rule for that page URL. 410 tells search engines the page is "gone" literally. This generally takes about a week for Google to notice, but can potentially take longer.
-
Hi Hashtag - Ricky is correct - it doesn't really matter either way as the 301 redirect will force the load of the new location page and its content whatever, so you won't be able to access your old page contents as its url is redirected - unless you have logins for your server of course...
-
Hi Hashtag,
If implementing a 301, there is no need to delete a page from your server. A 301 will essentially "delete" the page to both users and search engines while directing both to the new url. You can do it, but there is no need to.
Hope that helps!
-Ricky
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
What to do with large number of old/outdated pages?
Are we redoing a large portion of our site (not ecommerce). We have a large number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most). What should I do with those pages? Could you give any guidance on whether we should or what affect it might have one the rest of the website if we delete those pages or simply 301 redirecting all those pages to the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aphoontrakul0 -
Dynamic pages
Hello Team, How can we create dynamic pages or more pages on website but maintaining SEO standards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Removing old versions of a page.
Recently one of my good friends updated his iweb based screen printing site to wordpress per my recommendation. This update has helped dramatically boost his rankings to #3 for most local keywords. This new site is now V5 of his site, but all older iweb versions are still on the ftp. There are a total of 209 pages on the ftp, as versions of about 30 actual pages. The pages have changed significantly with each update, leaving very little duplicate content, but the old ones are still on the google index. Would it hurt the rankings to clean up these older versions & 301 redirect to the new versions, or should we leave them? The site for reference is: http://takeholdprinting.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoogleMcDougald0