Web Design ~ Marketing ~ Promotion ~ Strategic Development

Are You Deleting Your Old Web Pages?

By John F. Wright

Keeping your web site fresh

If you’re like many of us, your web site’s always in a state of change. Either you’re updating material, adding knew pages, changing out content, updating the site’s design, and so on. There’s always something needing your attention. After all, you know keeping your information fresh is the way to keep your customers coming back.

When customers know there’s always going to be something knew to check out on your site they’ll be back often. Of course, if you don’t keep your web site up-to-date and fresh your customer’s are going to go elsewhere.

Constantly adding and changing stuff on your site means pages become outdated and obsolete. Example: You’ve been working on new pages for a while and they're now ready to post. The new pages are named different so you swap the old ones out for the new, change the navigation menus to point from the old to the new screens and finally publish your site. You delete the old pages from the web so as not to clutter it up. There, that was ease. Time for a cold beverage!

A little file cleanup anyone?

A week or so later you decide to do some file cleanup on your PC. You tell yourself you’re not going to need the old pages anymore so you’ll delete them. Now everything's nice and tidy. From this point on you’ll be working only with the relevant pages. No more confusion over which pages you’re using and which ones you're not. As far as your web site goes, it's now taking up less room on the server. Nice!

Okay, so that’s all fine and dandy. But now what about your old pages that had already been spidered and are still lurking out there on the web somewhere? Did you think just because you deleted the pages from your site that the search engines won’t care about them anymore? Well, guess again.

Waiting for search engine spiders

Did you know that search engine spiders might only visit your web site every 4-8 weeks? So you shouldn’t expect any of your changes to show up overnight. Of course, that also means your old pages are going to be out there for a while too.

But, even after the spiders have been through your site, there’s no guarantee that your old pages will be removed from the search engine's database. Typically search engines will update and add pages but not delete any.

Okay, so now do you think deleting those pages was such a good idea?

Searching old pages

What if someone enters a keyword search and your old page shows up in the results and they click on it? That’s right, they’re going to be greeted by the dreaded “page cannot be found” message. If there’s one thing that really irks web surfers—and we all know this because it irks us too—it’s getting this message.

Do you think the surfer’s going to take the time to figure out a way to get to your site? Nope. It’s left mouse click and off they go.

The problem may not be because of search engine results either. What if the person had previously visited one of your old pages and bookmarked it with the intention of coming back later? Same result… page cannot be found! Bye-bye.

What are the simple options?

You do have a couple of simple options to avoid this from happening to you:

1. Leave the old page in place and simply add the new page. You can take the old page out of the navigation menu. Just make sure the old page links back to other pages on your site so if they land on it they can still navigate elsewhere.

2. You can leave the old page in place, strip out the page contents and in the META tag add a redirect statement. That way if someone does select your page from a search result it will hit the old page and immediately be redirected to the new page.

3. Make a backup copy of the old page before you make any changes then modify it and just keep using the same page name. That way you won’t have to use any redirect tricks or clutter up your site with redundant pages.

There are other ways around this problem, but these are the easiest solutions.

You’ll know better next time

Okay, now you’re savvy to what’s going on, has the light bulb gone on? This may seem like a no-brainer but how many times have you visited a site and got the “page cannot be found" message? Do you think they did it on purpose? The most often reason for this happening is because the webmaster’s deleted a page without thinking about the consequences.

So, the long and short of it, don’t delete any web pages unless you’ve devised a way to ensure someone can still find you even if they do run across one of your old pages. Play is safe, keep your fingers off of the delete key!

Until next time…

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