Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-06-15 17:47:21 - Graham Ellis
What do you do if you want to remove a web page from your site? Let's say that a product has been replaced by an improved model with (logically) a different page name, or you've restructured your web site so that an old URL is now illogical.
Obvious, easy answer ... search for all links to the old page and remove them. Yes - that's a good answer ... as far as it goes.
Is your search indexed by the search engines? Are your pages so good that other people have added in links to them? If you answer YES to either of those questions, then by withdrawing a page you'll be disappointing a proportion of your best traffic (that which is recommended to you) and your future (people who didn't know you until they did a search)
What you need for each withdrawn page is a "Graveyard page".
It works like this. You replace the retired page with a page that contain none of the keywords that the original was listed under - indeed has no useful displayed content. It simply says that "this page has been retired". BUT it provides a link on to the replacement page ... or on to a new destination if there's no exact replacement. And you also include a "meta refresh" tag in the header such as <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; URL=/net/recents.html">
How does it work?
Human arrivals, following links from other web sites or links provided by search engines won't get a "404" - they'll get a polite page that shows them that you don't let you web site get stale (good news!) and they'll get diverted on - automatically in 5 seconds, or manually, to the page that you now want them to see.
Search engines will still visit the page, but won't be impressed and it will slip down the ranking quite quickly. They will see the onward link, so they'll get to know of your new pages quicker than if you hadn't had the graveyard page there.