Best Practice for Deleting Pages
-
What is the best SEO practice for deleting pages? We have a section in our website with Employee bios, and when the employee leaves we need to remove their page.
How should we do this?
-
What we decided to do was a process for each deletion along with setting up a 301 redirect for any missing or incorrect bio to our Bio's home page.
First, we will remove the bio from the XML sitemap and resubmit the sitemaps.
Second, we wait a couple of days then delete the actual bio page from our site.
So far this seems to be going alright.
-
Brent, we'd be interested in hearing what you chose to do in the case with the employee bios, and if you encountered anything unexpected.
-
I'd just 301 it to your homepage, seriously doubt it would be worth the effort doing anything else unless this employee was famous and getting links from all around the web.
If you must, you could always do what others have suggested and write a nice "no longer working with us (content rich page) " and 301 all past employees pages to it.
-
I agree that it would serve little or no positive gain in terms of SEO, however, for usability and customer friendliness it should be a win-win.
Without our principles, where would our industry be?
-
I think that's a great idea! Having a custom 404 for deleted employees would be great for branding purposes and general web 2.0 friendliness - I'm sure SEOmoz would agree.
However from a strictly SEO point of view, removing the content and replacing it with 404esque material wouldn't help. However my comment(s) is pretty much a moot point given that there is almost certainly no SEO value on this page anyway. But I guess I'm just a principles kind of guy.
-
Why don't you 301 to either the main bio entry page or create a page for deleted empoyees (kinda like a custom 404) and update your sitemap. That way no benefit is lost and anyone landing on the page from say an external link, will not get frustrated.
-
This is why I suggested the Google webmaster tools.
Bing has a similar tool aswell.
-
Any negatives to using 301 on something like this?
-
Hey Brent,
Bing and Google won't see a 404 if you redirect. There also wouldn't be an issue with duplicate content - what exactly are you referring to here?
Speaking of 404s... your avatar is doing one.
-
I would rather delete the page, but I just hate having Google/Bing seeing 404s for a while. I would redirect but don't want to duplicate content pages.
-
There's always a way. Perhaps I would unlink it from the employee bios and whack on a noindex,follow meta tag to ensure it still passes rank if it was being linked to. This way users would never find it.
But more often than not I would just 301 unless for some reason there was a bunch of PageRank that would get lost in a redirect to an irrelevant(ish) page.
-
Normally I would agree Nick but he already stated the employees have left the company, leaving content about them on the site is not proper business.
-
It sounds like it's just a simple case of deletion? In this case, set up a 301 redirect so that it points to the employee bios 'home' page. That way any links that were pointing to the removed page will have their 'juice' moved to a page that does exist. Although with the content not being the same, the amount of PageRank passed is dubious but still worth doing.
If you do a 301 then you wouldn't have to worry about updating HTML sitemaps. But Bing does openly admit that they hate untidy XML sitemaps (i.e. URLs that include 301s, 302s, 404s etc) so I would clean that up - and probably do the same for Google too while I'm at it.
Personally, as an SEO (with varying degrees of tunnel vision) I wouldn't want to ever delete content.
-
Remove it and also update your sitemap to reflect the change. I know in Google webmaster tools it will allow you to block certain pages from now being crawled.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Local on-page SEO
If it feels like you are doing something wrong, then you 'probably' are... Local on-page SEO When optimising a page for local SEO, and trying tick all the usuals boxes, you find yourself adding words like 'golf clubs leeds' which sounds awful when part of a natural paragraph of text. Does Google recognise this poor use of grammar? We try to be as creative as possible, as not to offend the visitor, but it feels wrong... any advice? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | indicoll0 -
Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?
So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for. We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at. We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service. The term is "web design brisbane".
On-Page Optimization | | MauriceKintek
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others. Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking? All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears. Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well. Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.0 -
Outgoing Links Best Practice
Hi, It is my understanding that it is good practice to add relevant out going links to my content pages. I do not intend to over do it and the out going links I intend to add would be useful for the reader. My question is do I need to add noindex/nofollow tags to these links? Does it make any difference either way or can I just leave them as index/follow links? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | UnderMe0 -
Why is this page not ranking?
Can you please tell me why this page is not ranking. http://goo.gl/BqoRT The page doesn't rank at all for keywords but even if I copy a line or 2 of text it still doesn't rank for that text. Any help will be much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | JillB20130 -
How to: Meta description for home page
My latest crawl diagnostic is telling me that my homepage is missing a meta description. I am using wordpress and thesis. How do I add a meta description to my main page? ex www.mynewsite.com Mahalo!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Duplicate Page Content Should we 301 - Best Practices?
What would be the best way to avoid a Duplicate Page Content for these type of pages. Our website generates user friendly urls, for each page..
On-Page Optimization | | 365ToursSafaris
So it is the same exact page, just both versions of the url work.. Example: http://www.safari365.com/about-africa/wildebeest-migration http://www.safari365.com/wildebeest-migration I don't think adding code to the page will work because its the same page for the incorrect and correct versions of the page. I don't think i can use the URL parameter setting because the version with /about-africa/ is the correct (correct as it it follows the site navigation) I was thinking of using the htaccess to redirect to the correct version.. Will that work ? and does it follow best Practices ? any other suggestions that would work better ?0 -
On-page report tool
This is a question regarding the advise this tool offer to increase the ranking of a webpage with focusing with a particularly keyword we choose. I give an example: On-page Report Card am checking my keywords and I use. "cleanse london" my surprise is Report card give an "F" for my target landing page http://www.purifyne.com , but the issue is I am already in first place first position. I know SEOmoz know have the algorithm from Google to know how to rank better but my issue is should be a little more accurate! at least. I don't want to be misunderstood here, I just want more guidance, to rank much better using this tool that I am paying for. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | teksyte0 -
What's the best practice for implementing a "content disclaimer" that doesn't block search robots?
Our client needs a content disclaimer on their site. This is a simple "If you agree to these rules then click YES if not click NO" and you're pushed back to the home page. I have this gut feeling that this may cause an upset with the search robots. Any advice? R/ John
On-Page Optimization | | TheNorthernOffice790