How to Remove Web Pages Without Affecting Search Engine Rankings?
When revamping their website, our clients sometimes overlook one of the most significant changes: the effects of eliminating outdated content. Understanding the proper procedure is essential to deleting outdated pages from your website without damaging SEO.
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Of course, when a website becomes old and rusted, it is necessary to eliminate or redirect outdated pages. A 10-year-old webpage must frequently be updated with a fresh one or erased entirely. So, let’s take a look at how to delete sites while minimizing the impact on your hard-earned rankings.
First, should I redirect or remove it?
Before removing any pages, you should conduct a content audit to compile a list of outdated pages that you would like to reroute or delete. As you compile this list of pages, be careful to indicate next to each one why you would like to redirect or delete it.
Perhaps the content of a page is dependent on a specific date or event, which has now passed and the page is no longer relevant. It’s also possible that the products or services offered by your company have changed, rendering certain pages obsolete.
You have two to three options for the next steps for each page once you’ve created your list.
Google views pages and their distinctive URLs as independent entities. It may be advantageous to retain a service page that has been “live” for a while but requires some maintenance to remain relevant by just updating the content, changing the title tag, and performing keyword optimization.
If you decide to edit a page, be sure it will still be relevant and useful after the update. Pages that have been on a site for a while typically accumulate search and link equity, so look at the backlinks to this page; it may be worth preserving and improving.
Redirect
In terms of SEO, 301 redirecting defunct, irrelevant, or removed pages will transfer the majority of that page’s equity to the new page on your site. Use a 301 redirect if the page is receiving organic traffic, has backlinks, and you can redirect it to a relevant page.
Google’s index.
If you need to delete pages from your site, examine if those pages should still be available to site visitors.
There are methods for removing pages from Google’s index while keeping them on your website in case certain visitors need them. In this situation, adding a “no index” tag to the page and removing it from your sitemap are both options.
As an alternative, you might add a canonical tag to the page you want to take off Google’s index. This canonical tag informs Google that they should index a different page in its place.
There will be times when your site visitors should not be able to access certain pages.
As was already discussed, the first thing to think about is if the page has link equity or is getting visitors. See the section about 301 redirects above if it has any equity and gets some traffic.
If the page has no link equity, you don’t want users to reach it, and the material on the page is old and unmatched by any (more current) pages on your site, you should use a 410 or 404.
But which one should we go with? Do you know what the 410 and 404 codes on your website mean? Let’s go over what these pages mean:
410 Pages
A page that returns a 410 response indicates to search engines that the page has been permanently removed. Furthermore, it informs Google that the page will not be returned and that Google should not attempt to crawl it again.
Pages from a website that return a redirect 410 will not be indexed by Google.
For example, we had a customer who was hacked and later discovered that the perpetrator had built hundreds of pages only to link to other pages. When we discovered the hack, we wanted to permanently remove all of the spam pages from the index, so we used 410 errors to do so.
404 Pages
A 404 error is the message that appears anytime a link is broken, and you may be familiar with it. You shouldn’t have been able to access the page you intended to visit in the first place since it no longer exists.
It implies that the page could not be found, but it is acceptable for Google to attempt crawling the page again later.
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Conclusion
When a page is no longer available, we want to ensure that users do not land on it. A straightforward 301 redirect to the most relevant page might be the solution. When you have hundreds of pages that no longer exist, setting up a 410 redirect is the easiest approach to remove them from the index.
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