Forum Moderators: mack
I've had a site up for a few years which has some ranking success in google. However, recently i changed my hosting company. I also deleted 2 pages of the 14 page site, whilst moving the site
My rankings have now dropped quite a lot. I realize deleting 2 indexed pages was probably not a good idea.
What is your advice, should i recreate them with exactly the same name?
One was for an old primitive guestbook i no longer wanted mysite.com/guestbook
Could i recreate that page and have an automatic redirect to the main page somehow, or is it better to just put some information on the page, with links to the other pages on the site.
I use quite a simple WYSIWYG editor
Any advice much appreciated
Pete
Guest book pages tend to lead to spam, if people where simply arriving at your guest book for example, simply looking for the guest book, then this sort of traffic probably wont be missed.
What you should do is concentrate on expanding your site, by this I mean creating quality content pages related to your sites topic.
If any of the pages you removed where bringing in quality traffic then it may be worth recreating the pages and putting them back exactly as they where, same page name and url.
If you do want to put any pages back it might be worth having a look in the waybackmachine to see if your old pages have been stored there.
Mack.
Maybe recreate the urls and run them through Yahoo Site Explorer and see what kind of back links they had, and what kind of anchor text was used on those links, and the relevance of the linking pages.
Page Rank may not be as important as it has been in the past, but it may still have made a difference here for the removed pages and whatever PR they may have passed to your other pages.
I will check out if there are any backlinks in yahoo site explorere
