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
-
Building a new page: What on-page SEO would you build in?
Hi all, Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult. I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest? Cheers in advance, Rhys
On-Page Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
Will pushing a visitor to a conversion page hosted on a 3rd-party domain hurt the landing page ranking
Had an interesting question from a client. The client has a page that is optimized for a specific term. The goal of the page is to push users to sign-up for a trial. The trial registration (conversion) page is hosted by a third-party. Will pushing users to the conversion page cannibalize the SEO authority of the landing page. My reflexive answer is to say no, but now am not so sure.
On-Page Optimization | | infoblue0 -
Form Only Pages Considered No Content/Duplicate Pages
We have a lot of WordPress sites with pages that contain only a form. The header, sidebar and footer content is the same as what's one other pages throughout the site. Each form page has a unique page title, meta description, form title and questions but the form title, description and questions add up to probably less than 100 words. Are these form pages negatively affecting the rankings of our landing pages or being viewed as duplicate or no content pages?
On-Page Optimization | | projectassistant0 -
Best practices when targeting a different country and language completely.
Hi, I have just recently built a shopping site which is targeting users from the UK, built in opencart. Now I want to expand the site and also target customers in Thailand, for Thailand users they will need the site in Thai & English language. I was wondering what would be the best option to do this, taking into account best possible practice V's time involved. As I can see it have only a couple of options really. 1. Add a new language to the existing .com site. This seems to be the easiest and fastest option. 2. Clone the site and launch on a .co.th domain with Thai/Eng text option. Would their be any major benefit ranking wise as to having a co.th separate site. Or any duplicate content potential issues. Bit of a noob so don't be afraid to point out the obvious. I did have search and could only find topics relating to eu languages and GB v US. Is their anything extra that has to be taken into account considering the massive differences between UK and Thai. Thanks you for any guidance, Ian
On-Page Optimization | | cookie7770 -
Local Service Pages
We've all been here before if you do local. What type of content should go on a local service page when dealing with multiple service locations? You could: Describe Services List Local News Articles List staff in that location (although I would prefer in the staff page for that city) Testimonials from that location or service But what happens when you are describing something that needs no explanation. Or a medical procedure that requires no localization and altering the wording can actually cause legal problems if misstated. Matt Cuts recommends a few sentences to a paragraph to describe a service, but my experience hasn't found this to hold up locally. Any ideas or suggestions about how this could be remedied?
On-Page Optimization | | allenrocks0 -
Ecommerce category navigation structure -best practices
Hello, I've heard that there is a specific strategy for the best linkjuice distribution for categorizing an ecommerce site. How many links should there be on the home pages? Categories 1 deep? 2 deep? This client's customers don't like to go very deep, and they usually don't find our second page Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Landing Pages
Howdy Guys, We currently have around 19 landing pages that are near enough identical for each make of car. The content on each page isn't identical but you can tell its a template. Do you think we should change this and just target models instead of makes. Thanks, Scott
On-Page Optimization | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Home Page SEO
Hi! We recently re-designed our home page in early March. After Google panda, we re-tweaked it again, before we take it live, we really want to get some expert's opinions. We would be grateful for any comments/suggestions/feedback, particularly in the following area (you will need to click a few times to get the page to real size): is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. 2) We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page. Is this too much? 80% links on the footer is a repetition of header navigation links, do these footer serve any SEO value or is it over - optimization? Here is the URL: https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/36547134/1/WebDesign?h=109d4a Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | ypl0