Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old blog pages off the server
-
I paid somebody to build my website using Dreamweaver, and at one point I didn't know how to use the template which automatically updates every page in the menu section so I stupidly broke the template on every new page when I made the websites blog and put the pages into a subfolder. I realised this was a silly thing to do and now and I now know how to use the template correctly I've copied every single page over from the subfolder and put it into the main template.
Now I can update the template menu and every page changes automatically. The only problem is I've now got two versions of every page of my blog on the website.
For some reason when I do a sitemap it comes up with a links to the old blog pages I, don't know why when I've removed the links from the blog page? and also the new copies also. I have basically got a copys of all blog pages.
Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old indexed blog pages off the server so that when Google spiders the site it will pick up only the new links to the copy pages?
-
The 301 redirects was quite easy to set up, but I've actually found a better solution using Dreamweaver for my problem. I replaced all the old pages where I'd broken the template in the sub folder with new versions which are attached to the template with the correct copy and paste the content and title tags. So all the pages which are indexed and now the new looking version.
The one thing I've learnt from this episode is that if you don't know how to operate a particular piece of software and you can't get the answers you require immediately, be patient until you know how to do things correctly.
It saves time in the long run..............
-
A good description of how to solve your www vs non-www problem can be found here.
My .htaccess code looks like this...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]===============================================
Redirecting an old page to a new page is described here.
My .htaccess code looks like this.....
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm
-
I have no idea what htaccess files are, but I guess I will have to learn.
If a 301 redirect can simply transfer the old webpage directly through to the new one that surely must be the simple answer. Along of course within the incoming link juice.
Is that the case and if so that it will be my project for tomorrow morning as it's 2 AM in the UK
-
The 301 redirect will be very valuable.
You also have some canonical problems......
Both of these URLs display.
http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/Whitby-lifeboats.html
http://endeavourcottage.co.uk/Whitby-lifeboats.html
Do you know if your server can use .htaccess files?
-
I have just deleted the name of the subdirectory and kept the new blog webpages within the template of the website the same url.
It's very likely that there will be some back links coming into the old blog pages so would it be worthwhile to in the redirect 301?
or just deete the old indexed pages ..
Old
http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/whitby-blog/Whitby-lifeboats.htmlNew
-
In my opinion, it is very important to delete anything that might be a duplicate.
Also, if the old URLs have any external links their value can be transferred to your new page - making your site compete better almost immediately.
-
The original blog webpages were created about six months ago and they are indexed if you search etc.
I have just today updated the blog entirely so that it is part of the Dreamweaver template by copying the content from the old pages to the new, painful boring!
So the online website blog now has links going to the new pages moved from the subfolder address.
To people that drop into the blog page now see only the new version only, which matches the rest of the website design and template. I forgot to mention the updated in design recently to list other holiday cottages that are clients and that is why I primarily wanted to change these old blog posts to match the new template which now advertises the new holiday cottages I represent as a letting agent.
If I leave the updated blog page now will Google update the URLs of the blog posts links to the new URLs of the blog posts?
Or should redirect the old original blog posts with a 301 the redirect? I've never done a 301 redirects is it difficult?
-
Question: How long ago did you do this? Was your site established and pulling traffic when the change was done?
Question: If you grab a unique sentence from one of those pages and search for it do you see two copies on google? or bing?
If this was my site I would do 301 redirects of the old URLs to the new URLs and delete the old pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to add author avatar to my blog
hi i have a blog but i cant seem to see an option where i can add author avatar on the blog post. any idea how to do that? im using a wordpress site.
Web Design | | andzon0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
How do I optimize a site designed to be one scrolling page of content?
Our website uses section ID's as its navigation so all the content is on one page. When you click About Us, the page scrolls down to About Us. Products, the page scrolls to Products section, and etc. I am getting crawl errors for meta descriptions but will this go away once the main domain has this info? We just added the meta keywords and description to the header and since the navigation sections use the same page, I assume it will correct the errors. Any other advice on optimizing for site designs like ours would be great. www.theicecubekit.com is the site. Thanks,
Web Design | | bangbang
Chris0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Is anyone using Humans.txt in your websites? What do you think?
http://humanstxt.org Anyone using this on their websites and if so have you seen and positive benefits of doing so? Would be good to see some examples of sites using it and potentially how you're using the files. I'm considering adding this to my checklist for launching sites
Web Design | | eseyo1 -
Home page is not the highest ranking page?
Our websites do not have the home page as the first page in the search engines. It's something benign like the privacy policy page or the directions page! I've thought of adding no index to the privacy page, but then the directions or contact page would show up instead of the home page. One odd thing I've noticed, is that on our link to the home page on our menu and footer, the link is /default.aspx?mb=rte. But that shouldn't make a difference and default.aspx should rank first, right? What can we do to fix this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
What is a really great bounce rate for a product or service site? What does Good look like?
I am really curious about a result I have never seen before. Our bounce rate went down a lot on a new site. So, what is good??? Recently, we took on a project with a company that offers a product they install for consumers and who had been in business for 15 plus years. The company is successful, has good customer base of those who have been made very happy, etc. It is not a repeat sale type of product, etc. One and done. Their site when we began talking was roughly a year old and was not well constructed but not terrible. Most of the issues were around I frames, use of older coding, poor SEO, etc. There was not really a way to "redesign" and we built a new site. This became a true collaboration in a B2B environment as the owner pushed us like crazy. Not the bad kind of push, the one that makes you say to your team, "Let's find a way!" The result, IMO, was a gorgeous site. But, as you know, those are a dime a dozen. But, to get to the point, when we took over the account they had a bounce rate of around 45%. I did not see this as either good or bad, but a fact and for this industry probably not bad at all. In all honesty, I was not looking at that as a first metric I wanted to move, but it was obviously at or near the top for all the reasons we know. So, this site is a local business, not an everyday product and gets about 2500 to 3000 uniques per month. If we compare to May of 2011/2012: 2011 2012 Total Visitors 1852 3,298 Uniques 1609 2,740 Pageviews 5,634 23,203 Pages/visit 3.04 7.04 Avg Duration 2.05 3.20 Yes, I am leaving off what we are getting, yes, I am leaving off the site. Please don't hate me. I am really wanting to see what others see with site changes and bounce rates first and will disclose. So, what's a great bounce rate? How do you know?
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Can i do this? Will Google penalize me?
I have a page for a Criminal Defense Attorney and i set up a list of the type of criminal charges he is certified to deal with. I wanted to use title tags and put the Keyword "Miami Criminal Defense Attorney" & "Miami Traffic Defense Lawyer"... My question is will Google penalize me for plugging the same Key words over and over on the title tag for each ?? CHECK THE IMAGE to see what I'm talking about... thanks guys. x97dl
Web Design | | marig0