Joomla removed pages

what do I do if I must delete pages from my Joomla site?

[seopeople]

Hi,

Once in a while I must delete hundreds of expired pages from my Joomla site.

I'm looking for an extension that would enable me to redirect all of the removed pages' urls to the homepage of the site.

What are my options?

thanks.

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld seopeople.

Why not just write an informative 404 page?

[seopeople]

Hello bill, thanks :)

The reason is that then, external linking power would be lost. Or isn't it?

[bill]

Well, yes, but then my question would be why are you deleting the pages in the first place? The W3C says Cool URIs don't change [w3.org]...

[BillyS]

I don't think you want to 301 or 302 them to your home page. That might be worse than losing some link juice.

[seopeople]

BillyS, please explain your opinion on this. In my opinion it's really unpleasant to lose some link power. What are the downsides of redirecting the power to other pages?

Bill, thank you for the link. I've read it. It's really a nice read, however, as someone which optimizes many websites I can say that usually the website owner doesn't have much control over the changed URLs. Usually it's the website development company's fault - they change URLs without any notice. Sometimes the development company is so bad that they must rebuild their website with another company and would have to pay unreasonable amounts of money in order to keep the original URLs. What's wrong with a 301 redirects?

And as for my original question - it refers to a big forum of a big university. Each year, there's a forum which opens for 1 day for students to ask questions ("open day"), relevent to the next year. These questions are very informative and do index well in search engines and linked to from external sources. Due to internal policies (and we are talking about a huge company here), they must delete all of these posts before the next year's "open day". This causes thousands of good pages to disappear. Is there any reason not to redirect them to the homepage of this forum?

What would you suggest?

[bill]

Then according to the internal policies you refer to the pages should be served up with a 410 Gone [w3.org] code.

10.4.11 410 Gone

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

[seopeople]

Sounds logical, but what would happen to all of the external links power that the pages get? It would be a shame to lose it, won't it?

[BillyS]

I'm of the opinion that a page that a page never "expires." I would either update the page or "archive" it.

If removed, I prefer to use a 410 (Gone), not a 404. Google treats a 410 similar to a 404, and Yahoo treats 410s correctly (no experience with Live).

MS admits that they still cannot handle 301s correctly, they've given Google problems in the past (although they admit they handle them correctly now) and they've been known to give Yahoo problems too.

My advice would be to use your favorite search engine and do some research (even here) on 301 / 302 and the various engines.

If you're worried about the link juice, why not just stick the expired pages in an "Archive" directory and 301 the old links to the new ones... This keeps your home page clean. My real concern is that you want to 301 these expired pages to your home page.

[edited by: BillyS at 1:28 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2008]