To delete or not to delete?

[Tobman]

Tweet

Related to my post in the main forum:

What do you do about...

I wanted to ask:

If you have a website that's pretty well established in google, and say 20% of the pages are for defunct products, how does google react to a webmaster deleting those pages?

I guess the question I'm asking is: will google penalize your website if it constantly takes down pages, that are in the index, to keep things up to date?

[Barry]

I wouldn't delete them from the server - just modify them so that any user who does find the page via the serps knows its an out of date product and redirect the user to your homepage via a link or a search box.

I would delete the page from any navigation on my site though.

After a while the page may drop out of the serps and you can delete it - but for the time being if its attracting traffic - why waste it.

Ta

Baz

[thebusiness]

I guess the question I'm asking is: will google penalize your website if it constantly takes down pages, that are in the index, to keep things up to date?

There isn't much sense in deleting pages that bring traffic to your site

[Brendon]

If a page *really* is defunct, then yes, delete it. But as noted above, if it's merely for an old product, a replacement explaining to users why they can't find what they looked for, and where they should look instead would be more useful to everyone

[Smartphone]

Don't delete the page. Add similar products to that page. Or, at worst, do a 301 redirect so the traffic that still goes to that page gets sent through to the homepage.

[findlite]

Yep try and make money from the page or 301 to keep the link juice from it.

Never just delete something.... even the word "nothing" has "thing" in it :tup