How to redo web site

[gehrlekrona]

I have redone my whole site but am afraid that it'll be worse and not better. I have removed pages that could be frowned upon as duplicates in the way they are displayed and changed the looks and using HTML5.
I have a htaccess file sitting there waiting to be released that will 301 most pages, except the ones I haven't found yet that are still out there but not getting any traffic. I am sure Google will find an old page from 1998 and use the links from that one. Should I delete all old files? Is it better with "Page not found"? Should I do something with my 404 and other error pages?
I don't know if it is a good idea but I would like anybody to pitch in that maybe have done it and let me know what to think of,

[edited by: goodroi at 12:56 pm (utc) on Jun 1, 2012]

[goodroi]

When you are redoing a website you should first audit your old site to identify all of the bad issues to fix and also the missing items that would be good to add to the new one.

It sounds like you have thought out how to handle the 301 redirects so you do not lose link juice and also to minimize the error impact on your users. I would not be afraid of returning a 404 error if you are deleting low quality pages. If you are deleting a page that has inbound links (check your log files) then I would probably 301 it.

How are you improving the content on your page? Building strong content makes Google happy and it also makes it easier to convince webmasters to link to you, not to mention good content keeps users returning.

How are you handling the internal link navigation? Internal links are great because you can control them. Google tends to devalue links found in navigation bars or in the footer. Have you thought about better integrating your internal links inside of your content?

How are you going to handle freshness? Google tends to seek out and reward fresh content. If you have pages that haven't changed since 1998 that is probably not helping you. When you relaunch the site you should think about how to keep pages fresh.

How are you going to improve error handling? When you delete many pages it is likely to cause a bump in 404 errors. Returning a custom 404 error page will help to retain users. Retaining users is becoming more important as Google is paying more attention to usage signals.

Also you probably want to think about how your site will handle mobile traffic. Mobile traffic is becoming a very significant amount of users. I would make sure your site looks good using the iphone and especially the android. While you are at make sure your site performs well when using the Chrome browser.

[gehrlekrona]

Thanks @goodroi!
That was a lot of good things that might help me and others that want to and dare to change things around. I have been really hesitant since " you know what you have....." but with the recent changes in Google I thought I might as weel do it now. What I wanted to do is to use HTML5 with semantics and I wanted to remove "duplicates", pages where things might be thought as duplicate content, even though it might just be a little bit from another page. I have been adding instructional things to the site so people would go there for information also, not just to buy things. I have minimized the internal linking in menues so I will most likely loose a lot of anchors but then again, that might be a problem with Google the way it is now.
When it comes to freshness and old pages I was talking aboout a link to an old poage created in 1998 that had links to other pages that I don't have a clue still exists. That's why I was talking about deleting pages and then find out that a page is "not found" and redirect to the new "site". So it looks like I will have to create a new and better 404 page to return!
I have checked the site in my phone and it looks a lot better than the "old" one did and it loads faster so that's an improvement. I have a phone app downloaded by thousands and I have already redirected them to the new site :)
Internal linking? Are you saying it is better to have links and anchor text with the content than to have menues?
With all the extra info I got here, I will work on that and release it this weekend I think. Keep your fingers crossed becaus I know I WILL :)