In some cases, a website may no longer be relevant to your business. Or maybe there are other reasons for removing them. However, page shutdown can cause problems with search engine optimization and user experience.
What are you doing?
This article explains why web pages should be deleted and how to minimize the impact on SEO. Feel free to skip:
- Why delete your website?
- How does deleting your web page affect your SEO? Remove it?
Outdated content is one of the most common reasons people want to remove a website. For pages that don't deserve tedious updates and rewrites, this makes sense.
Sometimes you may want to delete web pages that are no longer relevant. In other cases, we may need to remove an entire section of our website. For example, if we no longer provide the services mentioned on the page.
Of course, some website owners may need to remove harmful content from their websites. But that's another topic.
SEO Impact of Deleting a Web Page on Your Website
Publishing a web page builds SEO value over time.
If you're getting links, and other ranking signals, and driving rankings and traffic, removing that page may stop rankings and traffic.
If a user follows a link to your girlfriend's web page from another page and the page doesn't exist, that user will get her 404 Not Found message.
This may affect user experience. Unless you handle 404 errors properly, users may click away from your site (and lose more traffic).
More on that later.
Therefore, be careful when deleting websites. Luckily, there are easy ways to preserve the value of these pages so your site and your users continue to benefit.
How do I remove the webpage?
If you want to remove the old web pages from the website, you have four options.
- Update content.
- Use 301 redirects. Make the
- web page private (redirect all visitors to a custom 404 error page).
- Use the 410 status code.
Option 1: Update content
OK, updating content does not remove content. But updating content is often the best fix for outdated content.
In fact, updating outdated content is an SEO best practice, and updating web content can improve relevance and ranking.
Therefore, before deleting a web page, first, consider whether you can update the content at its URL to keep the information up-to-date.
You need to make sure your content is "on the topic" now. In other words, just rewrite the content as needed instead of changing the page to a new topic.
Example: If a website publishes a new research report each year, the site maintains the same focus but uses new data.
The website simply updates the content at the same URL as this year's reports and highlights.
We may also update certain themes to make them evergreen. This might look like updating stats, recent trends, and angles to bring them up to date.
Remember, Google rewards websites that keep their content up to date.
Option 2: Do a 301
Before removing a page, check to see if the site has a second-best web page to which it can redirect. In this case, you can do a 301 redirect.
301 redirect sends users from site A (the site to be deleted) to site B (the new location).
301 The redirect causes search engines to index the new page (page B) and remove the old page (page A) from the index. It also transfers authority for inbound links from site A to site B in the process.
One caveat: make sure the redirected page is topically related to the original web page. Otherwise, users and search engines may be confused as to why they are directed to a web page that has nothing to do with what they expected.
In some cases, you may be redirected to the site's related category page if you are unable to redirect to the related web page.
The last resort is to redirect to the home page, but this is case by case.
Option 3: Unpublish your webpage (and create a custom 404 page)
If there are other options such as 301 redirects Sometimes the only option is to delete the page
In such cases, the server should return a 404 "not found" error message to anyone following a link to this page from elsewhere.
Awful user experience, but offers a unique opportunity to help users discover new content. Create a custom 404 page.
A custom 404 page is a web page that is served when a user receives a 404 error. This web page should contain useful information about what the user can do next. For example, you could provide links to other resources on the site instead.
From an SEO perspective, pages that have been deleted and returned a 404 error are usually removed from Google's index when the site is crawled again. Usually, that's exactly what you want after deleting a website. But remember, unless you have another better page on the same topic, it will no longer rank for those keywords. I recommend checking for possible 301 redirects. Google Search Console is a good place to start.
But in any case, the custom 404 page works fine to redirect the user to the new resource.
Option 4: Use a 410 status code
The 410 status code tells search engines that your page has been permanently deleted.
Google treats 404 and 410 the same. And Google has made this clear many times (for more on Google's stance, see this article from Search Engine Journal and this article from Search Engine Land).
Most websites use a 404 error for pages not found by default. One exception is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud e-commerce platform, and there may be others. So, if your website uses the 410 status code, remember that you need a custom 410 error page for your users as well as a custom 404 page.
Final Thoughts
It may be necessary to remove the website. Whether it's regular website maintenance or the need to remove content that is no longer valid, rest assured that there are steps you can take to minimize the impact on your SEO and user experience.
If you need help identifying weaknesses in your website content, our experienced SEO and content team can help. Please feel free to contact us for a free quote and service consultation.
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