- 997
Best thing to do would be to augment the pages with notices of updated plans.
Search Engines don't just want old pages, they want constantly updating pages.
Two Website Mistakes
- Thread starter Robert Barney
- Start date
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- website
Best thing to do would be to augment the pages with notices of updated plans.
Search Engines don't just want old pages, they want constantly updating pages.
- 1,432
For the most part, deleting pages is bad.
But if you don't have any back links to the page and it hasn't been indexed, you can just delete it. If you have control over all the back links (i.e. they are on one of your sites) just delete them and delete page.
If a page hasn't been indexed and has no back links, deleting it will have no impact on your SEO. Google never knew it existed and it has no "Google Juice" since there are no back links.
There might be a minor penalty if the page has already been indexed, but I don't think that the penalty lasts for that long. You avoid the penalty entirely by doing a permanent redirect (see below), but I wouldn't waste time doing a redirect if the page had no back links. You don't want to do this very often, but it won't kill your site if you do it occasionally.
You can update most pages. So long as the url stays the same, you can make any other changes you want. So in your scenario if the Anthem plans mentioned on the page are no longer being offered, you can change the text of the page to anything that makes sense and make no reference to the former version of the page.
In fact I think that you get almost the same number of "Google points" for updating an existing page as you do for creating a new page. You might get more depending on the page.
If you think that a page will become obsolete in the future, you may want to put in on your blog. Since most blog posts are conspicuously dated, you can probably just leave it there long after the information is stops being valid.
If you absolutely need to delete a page that has some back links, you can do a permanent redirect in either your main .htaccess file or one in the same folder as the file. (A redirect is one line of code. No biggie.) This way any Google juice you had on the old page gets passed on to the new one.
But if you don't have any back links to the page and it hasn't been indexed, you can just delete it. If you have control over all the back links (i.e. they are on one of your sites) just delete them and delete page.
If a page hasn't been indexed and has no back links, deleting it will have no impact on your SEO. Google never knew it existed and it has no "Google Juice" since there are no back links.
There might be a minor penalty if the page has already been indexed, but I don't think that the penalty lasts for that long. You avoid the penalty entirely by doing a permanent redirect (see below), but I wouldn't waste time doing a redirect if the page had no back links. You don't want to do this very often, but it won't kill your site if you do it occasionally.
You can update most pages. So long as the url stays the same, you can make any other changes you want. So in your scenario if the Anthem plans mentioned on the page are no longer being offered, you can change the text of the page to anything that makes sense and make no reference to the former version of the page.
In fact I think that you get almost the same number of "Google points" for updating an existing page as you do for creating a new page. You might get more depending on the page.
If you think that a page will become obsolete in the future, you may want to put in on your blog. Since most blog posts are conspicuously dated, you can probably just leave it there long after the information is stops being valid.
If you absolutely need to delete a page that has some back links, you can do a permanent redirect in either your main .htaccess file or one in the same folder as the file. (A redirect is one line of code. No biggie.) This way any Google juice you had on the old page gets passed on to the new one.
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- 10,275
OK. Thanks. I think it is indexed so I'll just update it with some somewhat relevant content.
Thanks Alston and Pangaea
Thanks Alston and Pangaea
