Deleting pages - can it jeopardize other good rankings?

[kalthoff]

I'm wondering if we're jeopardizing the good rankings for our entire domain with the following: We started getting rid of some pages almost a year ago now. E.g. we have two pages (translated) "red widget care" and "red widget". Both rank in the top 5 for those keywords and both pages have individual content. Out of concern that Google might not appreciate two pages for very similar keywords we removed the page "red widget care" from the site's internal linking structure and deleted the entire content save for one sentence "This page has moved. You find the new page here."

Incredibly the page ranked top 5 for almost a year now even though it's not linked internally anymore and has only that one sentence on it. We now tried to change the external links to that page and deleted it alltogether. Quite shockingly it's still ranking top 5 with the keyword with Google displaying the following in its SERP:

Title: 300 Multiple Choices
Description: The document name you requested ( /...........php ) could not be found on this server. However, we found documents with names similar to...

Now I'm really starting to worry that Google might at one point be fed up to show this result and penalize our whole domain since the page isn't there anymore. Am I worrying too much here? Am I stupid to delete the page in first place? What would be the best thing to do?

The reason we started this in first place is because we got hit by a penalty almost a year ago. We did the "remove everything that might be conspicuous" approach and it miraculously worked and we were back at full strengh after three month.

Looking forward to your opinions.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:55 pm (utc) on May 9, 2009]
[edit reason] edited specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

The url that won't quit! This sounds like it has some good external backlinks. Instead of fighting against it, how about making use of it. You could:

1. Place good relevant content for the keyword on that url, or...
2. Place a 301 redirect on that url pointing to another relevant url on your site.

[kalthoff]

Do you think there is a (remote) risk that if of our domain that has 500 pages around 30 get a 301 redirect pointing to other pages of that site, Google might perceive that negatively, especially if there are still external links to those 301 pages?

[kalthoff]

Would this be the right thing to do it:
Put the following code on the old .php page?

<?php
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: neue_seite.php");
?>

[tedster]

I've never seen 301 redirects, on their own, cause a problem for the whole site. One of the reasons for using them is to PRESERVE the value of backlinks to the original url.