redoing the website

[tarant]

If I was just spidered and am waiting to be reindexed and change my website in a major way in terms of content then get reindexed and people find the old content on google and it is not on the site what will they get when the click through

[Advisor]

They will get your new site, or a 404-error if the page no longer exists.

They may also get annoyed if the info they were looking for is gone. Make sure it's easy for them to find what they might be looking for.

Jill

[tarant]

Thank Jill so does this mean I have to keep this content 4ever?

[Advisor]

I don't understand your question.

[scottiecl]

Originally posted by tarant
Thank Jill so does this mean I have to keep this content 4ever? No- make it easy to find where the content has moved to. Create a custom 404-error page with links to the new pages so that humans and spiders can find the new pages easily.

[tarant]

what happens when I want to retire the content( dated Information) people will still come untils the spiders cannot find it and the it is deleted from the index-----well if I have a large site with lots of content should I chage it gradually over time in smaller amount to avoid a massive amount of people not Finding retired information move to off line databases

[haystack]

what happens when I want to retire the content( dated Information) people will still come untils the spiders cannot find it and the it is deleted from the index tarant, you mentioned that you're serving information from a database. If so, what's the motivation for deleting old pages? Why not just archive the content on the site? You mentioned that people are still looking at and finding the content apparently through search engines, so what's the motivation to cut them off?

[Net Wizard]

It's possible that Tarant is restructuring his/her URL structure. If so, then archiving will only result to 2 different URL having the same content.

What I do, is just simply retire the old URLs and redirect (301) everything to my home page or a special page. So far, Google have no problem re-indexing the whole site.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers