Removing Pages

[GregW]

I'm doing a redesign of an older site and transferring content from the old design to the new one by hand. I've noticed that there are a handful of pages that do not really provide any great information and receive very little (if any) page views.

Would it be a terrible thing to just remove the page from the site and leave it at that?

The reason is that I don't believe that the page has much value to the user or I do not particularly want that content on the site because it no longer "fits in". There is also the problem of finding somewhere to link to that page from, when really I don't particularly want users to see it any way. Rewriting wouldn't really solve too much either.

I was thinking of creating an "archives" page and linking out to all the unwanted content from that, but to be honest I think I'd rather just wipe it off the site.

Would there be any serious repercussions or are there any reasons why I would want to avoid doing this?

[Trikkur]

I want to know this too. I thought of doing the archives page just like you, but really would rather the page just not be there.

The best way I thought was to just 301 them. It will eventually remove itself from Googles index and then you can even remove it from the htaccess if your really want.

[Michael Martinez]

I always recommend using 301-redirects for retired URLs. It hurts nothing and may help in some small, unforeseeable way.

You don't want visitors to hit a 404 page if you can prevent that.

[NickM]

Why not just leave the page and link to it from a sitemap? It seems like it is better to have an extra page indexed providing extra links to your other pages. Am I missing something? Even if people don't view these pages, spiders crawl them and boost your internal link profile. Why get rid of something that is not hurting anything, and may actually help (even if very little)?

[Bryan]

I'm in the same boat with one of our sites. I'm 301'ing any pages that are no longer useful/relevant to the homepage (assuming there's not another page that would be of similar interest).

[GregW]

Thanks for all the replies, much appreciated as ever.

I'm in the same boat with one of our sites. I'm 301'ing any pages that are no longer useful/relevant to the homepage (assuming there's not another page that would be of similar interest).

I don't know if it's me being overly cautious, but would 301ing to the homepage cause some sort of confusion? I see the 301 as saying "this is where this page now exists, this is what you are looking for". But if you're 301ing an internal page that was on a topic of it's own, would redirecting these pages to the homepage send a mixed signal in some way to the search engines?

edit: don't know how well I communicated my thoughts on that one, so say if you want me to try and clarify that point.

[321]

I wouldn't ever 301 to the homepage. Choose the most relevant page, or the sitemap.

Keeping now irrelevant pages around is worse than clutter, and a waste of link power. It makes you look dopey to have reviews to defunct cardrooms, or pages on promotions that do not exist, etc.

[GregW]

I wouldn't ever 301 to the homepage. Choose the most relevant page, or the sitemap.

Keeping now irrelevant pages around is worse than clutter, and a waste of link power. It makes you look dopey to have reviews to defunct cardrooms, or pages on promotions that do not exist, etc.

Perfect, thanks 321. I'll redirect them to the sitemap.