When do I delete a page?

I'm still getting hits

[dvduval]

About a month ago, I switched many pages from htm to asp or cfm pages. I'm still getting tons of hits on the htm pages even though there is no way to get to them except through a search engine. What would be the 'professional' way to delete them?

Note: on one of the pages it is the #2 result for my main keyword (right behind the homepage).

[g1smd]

You could use a 301 redirect to point all the old URLs to the new ones. Several recent threads here discuss doing that.

For a site that I recently helped out with I merely put <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> on every old page, and made all of the navigation on the old pages point directly to the new pages (so that first click anywhere on the old site took you onto the new site). It took Google nearly two months to drop the old pages, and list the new ones in their place. The old pages will stay up until all the incoming links have been amended to point to the new site.

[steveb]

What you should definitely not do is leave pages with duplicate content up. Anything is better than that. Redirect them, put up a page with just a link to the new ones, whatever, but don't duplicate the content.

[g1smd]

I had no problems with duplicate content because all pages on the old site had <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> on absolutely everything, just a few days after the new site had been put online.

Google cleanly delisted all of the pages of the old site on 2003-06-15, and added all of the new site into the index the very same day.

[GodLikeLotus]

Would this be ok to use?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://www.mydomain.com">

[GodLikeLotus]

Can anyone tell me if its ok to use the above "nofollow" for a part of a site? I don't want to loose all the pages, just the ones that fall under the new domain. I wish I had never put them up in my other site as they are all showing up in both Google and Ink.

[g1smd]

Well, it worked for me (but took about 2 months), but others here think that it isn't so reliable a method.

I would give it a try. I also used "follow" with that "noindex" attribute value.

[GodLikeLotus]

Anyone with a more reliable method then?

[Proper]

I've got this in my .htaccess

ErrorDocument 404 [YourHomeUrl.com...]

sends all page not found to my home page. Works fine for me!

[sublime1]

Proper - while this is nice for users, Google or other SEs would see the 404 status and use this as a flag to remove the page from their index. If a page changes location, a better thing to do is have the web server respond with a status 301 (Moved Permanently) and in the http Location header specify the URI of the correct page.

[pshea]

dvduval: why not leave those .htm pages right where they are but all links on those pages click through to your new format? In this way, the old .htm pages act as a doorway page to your new site. Eventually, those old pages will probably lose popularity as the strength of your new pages take hold, then you can 301 redirect. If you've got some golden htm pages, I'd leave them in place until I could out-rank them.

[Jesse_Smith]

::ErrorDocument 404 [YourHomeUrl.com...]

::Google or other SEs would see the 404 status and use this as a flag to remove the page from their index.

I did that and it took about six months before Google deleted the dead links!

[g1smd]

>> why not leave those .htm pages right where they are but all links on those pages click through to your new format? <<

If you do just that, and nothing else, you will get a duplicate content penalty. Google will list only one copy of the page, and not the other. Thing is, you'll have no control over whether they list the old or the new page.

To ensure they drop the old pages, you must either flag them as robots: "noindex" or else remove the content and put a 301 redirect in.

[pshea]

>>do just that, and nothing else,<< Correct, you should move some content around a little.

[pageoneresults]

I'd put up a custom 404. Use the Server Header Checker (available through your Control Panel) and make sure the 404 is returning a 404 status in the header. I've seen a lot of 404's return 200 status code and cause problems.

If you can set up 301 permanent redirects for the old to the new, then that would be the preferred method. If not, then definitely get a correct 404 page in place so that the dup content issue is addressed.

Google is pretty good about merging duplicate content and dropping dead pages after an update or two. Between now and then, you may find yourself with some dual listings (indented) that show both the new and old pages until Google sorts things out.