I want to kill an obsolete page on my site.

301? 404? What do I do?

[larryhatch]

I have an old page, which is entirely entirely replaced by a newer better page.

2 years ago, I put the following onto the old page, having dropped all the content: (paraphrased):

<META http-equiv="refresh" CONTENT="5;url=http://www.mysite.net/New-Page.html">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">
I didn't add the "nofollow". I wanted to refer the engines to the new page.

NOW, I want to drop the old page entirely. It gets virtually no traffic I can see.

What are my options? Any recommendations?

I could simply remove it, forcing 404 errors.
I would like to do a Permanent Redirect. Is that a 301 redirect?
If I do a 301, do I have to mess with my .htaccess file? (deeply dreaded!)
Can I make a 301 redirect with some magic ON-PAGE code, having much the same effect?
Is there something still better I could do? Should I just leave it as is?

Any help much appreciated! - Larry

[kevinpate]

For an old page with no appreciable traffic, I'd simply delete it and move on, particularly since you seem to not be on touchy feely terms with your htaccess file.