What to do with old pages

Websites
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been with REW for about 20 years. I’m currently in the process of upgrading from my old “Barbara” website to a new “Renaissance LUX” website. When I built my old Barbara website, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I serve the entire Bucks County, PA area. That includes dozens of townships, cities, zip codes, school districts, etc. I also have 435 communities listed on my old website and I’m reducing that list to 360 communities. I want to focus only on the most important cities and communities, so many of the township, cities, zip codes, school district, etc. pages are no longer part of the new website.

When the new website launches, what do I do with the old pages that are no longer included in the new website? I didn’t delete the pages. I’m pretty sure that most of these pages are indexed and some actually generate a little traffic, but they don’t generate the types of leads I’m after. Because these pages are so old, they don’t even appear right in the new website, because the old snippets no longer work on the new website. They just appear as blank pages.

So here are my questions:

  1. Should I delete the old pages?
  2. Should I recreate every snippet for a page that appears blank?
  3. Should I go through every page and check off “Hide from Navigation” and “Hide from Sitemap”?

I don’t want Google to penalize me for no longer having these pages on my website. What is the best way of not including these pages in the new website and not take a hit from Google?

Thanks in advance.

Russell

1 Like
2

I was wondering about the exact same thing. My site needs a massive cleanup! Lots of extraneous pages not much good for SEO.

3

Hi @RUSSELLVOLK and @jolenta,

Great question to ask, actually. Generally, you shouldn’t redirect all pages to other community pages unless the other community page can genuinely match the search intent of the old page. Google can tell if a redirect doesn’t match what the old page was about, and can sometimes penalize you for it.

Redirects can happen in the backend of your site; it’s a pretty straightforward process.

For everything else, you CAN delete them and let them 404, but setting a 410 is a stronger signal to search engines to “stop looking for this page.” So the workflow would be to create a list of URLs you want to delete, and save that list. Then, once the pages are deleted, someone from our dev team can set a 410 status code and remove them from the sitemap.

The last bit of work is just removing any internal links from your website that went to those URLs. Search engines don’t love broken links, so that’s a necessary clean-up job. That includes pages, blogs, navigation, header, and footer.

Let me know if you have any questions.

1 Like
4

Thank you Wes. I appreciate your input. I’ve been in contact with Kyle Allen today and he’s been extremely helpful. He got in touch with some of the SEO guys and they said the same thing… to do a 410 status. I currently have about 1,700 pages on my website. I’m shrinking my website to about 600 pages. So I’ll have REW delete and 410 the pages that I no longer need.

Thanks again.

5

If some of those pages still receive traffic, I’d avoid deleting them outright. A 301 redirect to the most relevant new page is usually a better option, as it preserves any SEO value while giving visitors a better experience.