delete or keep old page when renaming?

[sting8]

As far as thinking about search engines, if I have to rename a page that has been indexed, should I keep the indexed page around, but maybe just clean it out and put a message that it has moved with a link to the new one, or is just deleting it OK? I'm just wondering if when the search engine goes to re-index it and finds it's gone, it will somehow penalize the site or anything...

Thanks
Parry

[Marcia]

Redirect the old to the new with a 301 permanent redirect. As far as search engines are concerned it's a brand new page and you don't want 2 identical pages in there.

[Farout]

Nice - never thought about deleting the old ones, to prevent duplicate sites :)

But I'm stupid :( .... how do you make a 301 redirect?

[sting8]

Actually, I'm not on my own web server - I'm using a web hosting company, so I don't think I can do a 301, can I? That's why I was thinking of either deleting or clearing the page out and just linking to the new one... thoughts?

[kevinpate]

Check with your host on whether you can do a 301 redirect (you probably can.)

If not however, there's another way that's fairly easy to put into place. Let's say you wanna rename mypage.html to newpage.html

Strip down mypage.html and then add a link out to newpage.html

Assuming mypage.html is getting spidered, the bot will find the link to newpage.html on the next visit.

Also, change any internal links on your site for mypage.html so they point to newpage.html