What to do with old web pages after a re skin?

[Nightwing]

Buongiorno from foggy & wet wetherby UK

Having launched a website there is a cluster of old redundant pages which i dont want to appear in the serach engines problem is they deliver search traffic.

Would it be best to 301 redirect them? Or delete them & 404 Not found alert, I'm really not sure whats best

Any insights welcome

[Nightwing]

Also to add.... the old urls have stacks of repeated title tags Now if i redirect i'm guessing I'll still have to correct the repeated title tags or will webmaster tools still nag me about repeated title tags.

I have a feeling if i redirect the old urls I'll also have to undo the repeated title tags. Would be great if someone could confirm this would be the case so i can order some strong coffee for the grim task ahead!

[TheeDigital]

Nightwing(I like the name),

I definitely like the idea of using 301's as Tom said there is no point in losing the traffic that those pages are bringing in.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

If they are bringing in traffic, whether it's from search or direct, then I think it's a good idea to 301 redirect them to the closest corresponding page that you can.  This way it doesn't interrupt the user's journey so much.

If you really don't want to redirect the users, you could instead block the pages in a robots.txt file or (better yet IMO) add the following code in the tag of the pages:

This will instruct Google to stop indexing the page, thus stopping that flow of search traffic.  However, users would still be able to access the page if they found the URL, and so if you didn't want them to see the old reskin, again a 301 redirect might be in order.

Worth mentioning though that 404 errors are not a bad thing and Google does expect them to be part and parcel of the course - so it's by no means a "bad" option if you go down this route.

Hope this helps!

[dotfly]

Hi nightwing,

in such a case I would always recommend a 301 redirect to avoid any loss of linkjuice, DA or whatever you prefer to name it. We`ve have made good experiences with that in the past...