Hi DP Members, I have a website providing software solutions from past 5 years and the website seo started 2 years back. Now the company is coming up with new changes in its technologies as well as services. So the whole website is being updated. My existing website is having all the pages indexed in SEs. And some of the pages are positioned well for some keywords. Now am clubbing some technologies into single page( in new website). So I have to replace 4-5 old pages with single new page. Now my question is - Shall I keep the old urls and redirect them to new ones? or do I need to remove them completely from search engines and start seoing on new urls? Thanks in advance..
You should always be careful with these things, because you might lose a lot of SEO power if you're not careful. I have doubts whether you can condense 4 or 5 well-ranking pages into one and maintain the position in the SERPs. I would suggest that you keep the pages, at least initially, and simply redirect one to see whether you maintain or not the ranking. You might also consider to use the best-ranking page names, and combine several of the pages into that specific page, without any kind of redirection.
If those 4 -5 old pages have many backlinks pointing to them, it would be worth keeping and redirecting them (so as to keep the backlinks).
Use 301 redirects to point the old page URL's to the new pages where their content will be appearing. Read up on it here, advice and directions from the company that you are trying to keep happy - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633 To be clear, in your case where you have 5 pages now and are aggregating that content into a single page, you just redirect all 5 current pages to the single new one. There isn't some rule where you have to keep the content on their own separate pages or suffer a penalty as the result of aggregating the content. The biggest "crime" you could commit in the eyes of Google would be to delete the URL's completely and not tell Google (and Google search users) what happened, so use those redirects to avoid penalties.
Thanks for the helpful replies. We are now trying to keep up some pages which are already crawled and indexed well for keywords. And some content modifications to those pages are done. We are also trying to add some new pages. The count of 301 redirects may get reduced now. Thanks agian.
Hi all, If I want to redirect my urls, which method will be the best? using htaccess? or from webmastertools??
please do not remove your old url..do not merge them in to single url..just redirect them on new one..if url is new then wait..goggle always give maximum rank to new pages of old sites..