Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
Image naming best practices?
While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance... Max characters for image name? Max hyphens? How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg" How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be? At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow? So much more, but you get the idea! Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OSD0 -
I have two pages ranking for the same keyword.
The index page and the targeted landing page for that keyword. They have different content, title, meta but I am competing with myself for the main keyword in the industry. What is the best way to fix this? 301 the keyword page to the index page?
On-Page Optimization | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
URL best practices, use folders or not ?
Hi I have a question about URLs. Client have all URL written after domain and have only one / slash in all URLs. Is this best practice or i need to use categories,folders? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | 77Agency0 -
How to Define Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
I am working on my website to edit structure with help of Google's search engine optimization starter guide. There is really good instruction to define URL structure which help us to perform well over Google's organic search. I have resolved issues regarding category pages but, I have confusion to define best URL structure for product pages. My website's product page URL structure is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html http://www.vistastores.com/homefurniture-winsomewood-93630.html URL structure is constructed with following terms. 1. Root Category Name (Market Umbrellas or Home Furniture or ....) 2. Brand Name 3. Manufacturer Part Number I am not happy with this structure and also not performing well over Google's organic search. I am thinking to include product name or title tag in URL after root domain. But, it may create very long URL and create issues in organic search display. Does it really matter to perform well over Google's organic search? How can I define best URL structure for product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0
