How do I change the site indexed content on search engines?

[iloveu]

I have a 1-year-old shopping site which is indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines. We don't have good sales on our current products, so we are going to switch to other products. I will delete all old files and compose new files for new stuff. But how can I change the seach engine indexed content? Since the products we will carry are absolutely different from old ones.

[JayC]

Generally you don't have to do anything. Search engine spiders presumably are regularly visiting your site, so as long as the site is well-constructed so that they can find all of the new pages, those pages will be indexed. The pages that you remove will not be found by the search engines, and so eventually will be removed from the various insexes.

In the interim, until those pages are removed from the search engine indexes, you may get some visitors who click through from those listings to your site. You should have a well-designed 404 error ("File Not Found") page that informs those visitors that the product they're looking for is no longer available and either directs them to your index page or itself serves the same purpose of allowing them to explore your current inventory.