The 301 redirect: if a page, about baby carriages for example is redirected to a page having nothing to do with infants, say tools, what happens? SEO wise
I’ve debating what to do with pages having content themes that are being permanently discontinued.
Worst case, someone working in the quality team decides you’re manipulating SERPs (which you are) and penalizes your site.
The 301 HTTP status code means a piece of content has moved to a new location. The baby carriages page has not moved to the tools page.
That should technically be a 404 then?
I don’t want to have an entire list of 404’s when I rebuild the site. The theme of the whole site is taking a shift.
Any ideas?
How about if I remove all traces of linking associated with the pages to be removed, and then do for all pages the robots:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /unwantedpage.htm
And later in the year, once these pages are no longer recognized by the search engines, remove them entirely.
I have a page with no inbound and outbound links, which has been disconnected from the site for 5+ years. Yet Google still carries it in their index. - Wouldn’t feel comfortable killing it.
Use webmastertools to remove unwanted indexed pages - else a robots.txt as described over is a good way to restrict SE robots to find them again after.
I see where G suggests the robots.txt http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
User-agent: *
Disallow: /unwantedpage.htm
Disallow: /unwantedpage2.htm
Disallow: /unwantedpage3.htm
I see the public removal tool at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals