Hello, friends. I'm very new to website design and would appreciate some advice. I have a small bible teaching website (http://www.jimfeeney.org). I created it on my Mac with Freeway Express. At first I created my bible studies as individual pdf files. Later I learned how to convert them to html, which works better. Tech help at Freeway advised me to put all my old pdf files in a separate "pdf" folder and begin converting one at a time to html. I've been doing this and now have almost all in html. Google, Yahoo, etc., long ago indexed all my pdf pages. They still show them as indexed pages. So that brings up my question: as I rewrite a web page into html, can I then safely DELETE the old pdf file for that same page? Or will that frustrate Google and Yahoo and others by suddenly having a bunch of previously indexed pdf files that now suddenly seem to no longer exist? Thanks for any help/advice you can offer. I'd like to get rid of those now-obsolete pdf files if I can, without confusing the search engines.
The best thing to do would be to redirect a web request for the PDFs to the new HTML. But if you can't do that, I wouldn't worry about it, and just delete the PDFs. Google and the others will spider the new stuff soon enough.
Thanks, Shawn. I think the new html files are pretty much indexed by now. So I'll just go ahead and delete the pdf's. Thanks.