Changing Directories. Do I delete old?

[SEO2Go]

I am updating my website. The website has dozens of articles. I will be doing a permanent redirect to the new page from the old page. Question is, should I remove the old page completely after redirecting, block it in the robots.txt file or just leave it alone?

I get a lot of traffic to these articles, so I want to make sure I handle the change in a way that won't upset the search engines.

[jatar_k]

don't ban it in robots.txt

whether the page is actually there or not doesn't matter because apache redirects it before the page is served and will serve the new page instead

you can always test it

remove a single page that you have redirected and see what happens when you request it directly

you could also use a header checker to see if you get the proper response for the redirect