0

Hope someone can shed some light on the best way to do this. We currently have a website with roughly 3 1/2 million pages indexed into google. Now we've decided we no longer need this site and we're taking it down and replacing it with a much smaller (totally different) site on the same domain.

So the pages that are already indexed i would like them all to direct to a single page explaining what's happened to them. (if that makes sense).

So for arguments sake lets say the site i want to remove all pages for is 'xyz.com' so if someone clicks on an indexed page e.g 'xyz.com/indexed-page/' i want that to go to a new page on 'xyz.com' let's say 'xyz.com/what-happened-to-indexed-page/'.

Now i'm guessing i shouldn't be doing 301's here because essentially i'm not moving the indexed pages, i'm actually removing them. So would it be best to just send all the current indexed pages to a custom 404 page and explain there what's happened to said indexed pages?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks

alexkodr
  • 523
  • 3
  • 7
  • 30

1 Answers1

0

Use a HTTP status code of 410 GONE to indicate the pages are permanently removed. Doing a 404 will tell the searches engines to keep retrying which they will do for a while before they finally assume it is gone permanently. That will punish your server and pollute your logs.

Regardless of status code your idea of having a page explain what happened to the pages is a good one. Users will continue to find those old URLs for quite some time and explaining why they are gone is great usability. Nothing is more frustrating then thinking you're finding one piece of content only to be taken to a page that does not contain that content.

John Conde
  • 217,595
  • 99
  • 455
  • 496