hi there my site has been online over a year. I think up all the content and my webmaster designs it. When i began, i knew nothing about SEO, so site was invisible, hardly any visitors and currently only has 20 out of about 80 pages indexed and not many backlinks and page rank of 1. We are nearly finished totally redesigning the site, it's properly optimized and so forth. loads more pages, site map planned, next stage is a backling campaign....etc PROBLEM- most of the old web page url's have been changed. A google search to see what pages aRE indexed shows me that google has clocked the NEW url but this directs the visitor to the OLD page...and the old meta title and meta description are still up in the search results.........now given these 20 or so indexed pages are ranked very very poorly, and given that nearly all the OTHER old web pages that are NOT indexed yet are on the server we used are also a waste of time, would it be better, simpler (and cheaper for me!!) to simply delete all the poorly indexed pages entirely- i mean take them off the internet and leave only the home page and a couple of others up.....and then get my webmaster to also entirely delete the other old pages he has ands basically just "start again" with entirely new, totally revamped, heavenly SEO'd pages Neither he nor I know much about this stuff- he is a designer first and foremost and we;ve learnt the techno stuff as we go along. So we are wondering if there would be any terrible penalty for wiping pages completely off the net ? and starting over the entire site bar the home page and a few others (which we WOULD put 301'2 on) with totally brand new pages ? We can't move until we get a definitive idea of what the best way forward is. Like i said, the old site is invisible really- so not like there is anything to lose, and the backlinks i do have are all to the home page, not to internal pages, so there is no concern about losing points any which way you look at it ? thank you in advance from two very tired and stressed brains !!!
Definetely do 301 redirects to the new pages. Although they dont rank really well if you get to get a bit of exposure for the the older age will help. Personally, once any page has been indexed I do my best to keep it there, wether its ranked highly or not. Hope this helps
yes, was thinking to do 301's on the 20 pages currenty indexed by google but then basically delete all the others that havent appeared yet, so that they are replaced by the brand new ones rather than risk, at any point in the future, having further OLD pages getting indexed....this way we know that any more pages that do get indexed one day will have no history with older versions of that page so wont need 301's.........really dont want to be still doing 301's on pages every few months and problem is we can't remember all of the old url's in order to know what ones to redirect , so we only have the power to redirect the ones currently in google...else my webmaster would take hours and hours trying to sift through the old data, and it's expensive!! we just want to make sure that deleting old pages is kosha basically
Not doing a 301 redirect on each and every old URL to the new relevant content will be a long winding road of frustration for you, ranking wise. Spend the extra few hours and catalog each of your pages in the main index and make sure you have a redirect in place for each.