Hi, I have been in Googles search engine for a little while now and my business has grown quite rapidly and is still growing. The only problem that I have is that my website is mostly all database driven. So I was just what happens if I have an article on my site and then someone asks me to take it down. Once I take the article down all the links, linking to the article through my site is gone, but the articles page is still accessible if there is still links pointing to it from the major search engines and other sites. Although, when people click on the link from a major search engine all they will see is a messed up page with no article on it as it has been deleted. Could things like this get you banned as Google may think that it was not an old page, but some sort of doorway page as my site doesn't link to the page anymore as it is now an old page, but the page actually still has my sites links on and things. I say this as I have deleted a few categories on a part of my site so I can't get to them anymore unless I type the proper url into the navigation bar so that it is the same as what it would have been when them categories were still there. Although when you go to the page, it still brings up a page, but it is rather messed up as it is database driven and some of the information is not being pulled from the database as it has been deleted. So could this get me banned as there's old pages are not turning in 404 pages as what they would if they were real static html pages. If so, then what does other media sites do and things once their article becomes old or someone asks them to take something down so it will not be on their site anymore. They will still have to links in the search engines to that page, but the page doesn't actually exist. On some parts of my site, when an article gets taken down I have done something so it actually says something like "this article is no longer published on our site".
There is no reason why a database driven site could not return 404s. Just modify your script or let someone do it for you. If you have inbound links, you may even consider redirecting visitors to a replacement article if you have one. To answer your question, I do not think the current state will get you banned. Search engines ban people for breaking rules, not for being lazy ;-)
Yeah, but won't Google think you are breaking the TOS by having pages that are not linked up to any other part of your site and when you get to the page from a search engine then that page links to your site. Doesn't that look like a doorway page or something. Wouldn't Google think that is a doorway page rather than a page that you don't really want anymore so you have stopped linking to it and have left it there sort of thing.
In my opinion no. Okay, it's not good for the visitor to your website, but it's not exactly a doorway page, if there is no content on it. You have a few options; - if your host used cpanel you can set up a 404 page there - do a redirect so that someone who comes to that page is directed to another page on your site (make sure it's a permanent redirect via Mod Rewrite) or do a javascript direct, but make sure its more than 10 seconds, so that Google doesn't think your trying to deceive the visitor. Darren
It's best to do a 301 redirect. Java redirects can be "automatically" found and the pages filtered. Dave
It's seems alot of work doing 301 redirects and things. I have not got a small site. I am working on a site that has over 100,000 pages. Sometimes I do things like, today for instance, I have around 66 categories in my articles directory where I get articles submitted my authors and I then approve them manually before they go live on my site. Well some categories have over 2,000 articles in and there were few that had 0 - 5 articles in. So I could clearly see that these categories with only 0 - 5 articles in them were not the right categories so I then changed a few of them to more popular categories and I then deleted some of them, say around 10. So that means that I have 56 categories that are working as normal and 10 that I have deleted the category listings out of the database and then produce pages that don't really have content on and can't get visited by clicking on links from my site, but can by search engines as they will still have my links in. Another thing is that I also have a product price comparison which has products in them that is here one minute and then gone the next. So these pages that has the details about the product can still be accessed from clicking links from a search engine but people will not be able to follow a link from my site to that page as my links get deleted automatically to that page. I don't know what product pages are there one minute and then gone the next. I am talking about over 2,000,000 products. My products database is updated every day so there could be anywhere from 50 - 5000 or more product prices becoming dead with hardly no content and they are still listed in Google. How can I do redirects on these, I can't exactly manually go to each one and do a redirect. If I do 404's on them then won't all of my pages get 404. Do you think I am worrying over nothing, and it should be alright just to leave these pages to automatically disappear gradually from Google as I am not linking to them so Google my stop linking to them also. The reason why I am getting worried is because I know people get banned and I don't want to.
I can't imagine you'd get banned from google for a couple pages disappearing? (Btw, you are talking about being banned from the entirety of the search engine right? Not any program like adsense?) I've changed all my links from ?var=page to /var/page and just stopped linking to the old ones, they drop out of google and google finds the new ones. The old ones are still accessible (and sometimes messed up also), but no links to them. It happens, it would be kind of insane for google to ban you over something like that.
That seems ok then. I have been banned by Google once before and it took me nearly a year to get in and I don't know how I got banned, but I had done alot to my site, which involved me redesigning the whole thing a few times before getting back in. The thing with the site is that I were not trying to break Googles TOS and I didn't even think I was. But after doing minor things like making sure all of my site is seen in the cache of googles, making sure that when somebody types in http://simp it redirects straight to http://www.simp using 301 permanent redirect so that I don't get duplicate copies of pages in google with the urls http://simp and http://www.simp, etc. I done so many little things and Google doesn't tell you how you got banned in the first place. So all I know it could have been because I was changing the paths of files and the old paths still worked and stuff like that. That is the main reason why I brought this subject up is because I don't want to get banned again. I am following their Webmaster Guidelines very closely.
You have lots of pages taken down because of people's request? I might interpret it wrongly, but from what I read, you probably have bigger problem than missing content pages. Are your pages taken down because of you use other people's content, or you are posing deflamatory comment? If so, you should work on that area first, because sooner or later you might face a company large enough to take legal action. Sorry if I am wrong about this.
Hi, You have got it wrong. The articles section is just an example. Since I have been running the articles section on my site I have had to take down around 5 articles in total and I have had this articles section on my site for around 2 years now. All the articles that are on my site are writen and submitted by the authors themselfs. The only articles that have really been taken down is the articles that the author didn't want listed anymore due to some odd reasons. Anyway. Using the articles were just an example. My main concern is the products pages as I am using dynamic content from merchants and they stop selling products and bring new products out all the time. So when they stop selling a product the page that lists that product on my site then becomes non linkable from my site, but Google still links to it. That is one thing that I definately don't do is to steal other peoples hard work. I have enough hassle when people try and copy the whole of my site. I know how much work is put into developing a site. All of the articles on my site has been submitted by the merchants themselves. I have not manually submitted any of them. The main reason why I first mentioned the article pages is because I have just been working on the categories of the articles directory where I had deleted some of them and I could still see messed up pages if I typed the link into the nav bar or clicked through to the page from Google. I couldn't click through from my site though. Anyway, I think I am now getting rather concerned over nothing much.
sori, my mistake there. is it possible to change the page so that if it can't pull up any information then it will show 404 page?
Yep, that can be done. Infact, I have already gone through every site of mine and done it. It has taken me just under 2 full days to do all of the url validation and if the urls don't validate then it throws up my 404 error page instead. Although this works great, I have not used it on every page. For example, I have not used it on the search engine pages where you have to use a search box to search for things. I don't want my visitors to search and find that they are then at a 404 error page just because their search brought up no results. What I have there is a error saying "your search has found no results, please try search again using different keywords or phrases".
Don't delete the page or do a 404. Keep the page - its a trusted old page and very valuable real estate. Put some links to some similar articles and write a paragraph with some relevant keywords to say the article about xxxxxxxxx entitled yyyyyyyy has been removed from the archive, however you may be interested in zzzzzzzzzzz.
I have got similar things like that with my products search. Once I product now becomes un-available on my site it gets replaced with "this item is no longer listed on our site" and then below it is some random products that may interest the visitors. With the articles I have moved them from the categories that are not doing all that well where I have now placed them in the miscellaneous category and then I have now changed the not so well category names to more popular names and they have now started to fill up with people submitting to them.
its better to upload the sitemap in google webmaster tool, when ever there is a major surgery on your website, in that way you are informing google