As your business grows, so does your website. Often, you can keep pages on your site. But when you redesign your site, or you stop offering a good or service, you may need to remove pages.
When it comes to removing unnecessary pages on your website, it’s highly important to understand the correct way to do it, so you don’t negatively impact your search rankings.
Other reasons to remove pages include redesigns, during which you may condense information from two pages onto one. So let’s look at how you can remove pages while minimizing the damage to your hard-earned Google search rankings.
Redirect or Remove?
Before you remove any pages, you need to figure out if you want to remove them completely (a good idea if you no longer offer the product or service) or redirect the page to a new page (like an old “about us” page to a new “about us” page). We suggest using a spreadsheet, then including a link to each page in one column. In the next column, say if you are keeping it, removing it or redirecting it.
Perhaps a page’s content is dependent on a certain date or holiday, like July 4th. When that date has passed, the page is no longer needed. So that’s when you ask yourself if you should remove it, redirect the page to a new one or keep it, but hide it from public view.
How to Find Pages to Remove
Finding pages for removal from your website (and Google search) is a matter of common sense, but those pages can be hard to remember especially if you have a lot of pages on your website. Signs your content should be redirected or removed are:
- Low impressions/clicks, which you can see through analytics reports
- Extremely outdated content for one reason or another
- Pages that don’t really serve a purpose because the information is elsewhere
One thing to keep in mind is what you mean by “outdated.” If it’s a page that mentions a date and year, you can hide or remove it. But if it’s a matter of simply changing references to the year, you can do that without removing or redirecting the page.
Once you’ve got your list, you have two to three options on what to do with them.
Rewrite them
Google analyzes web pages independent from other web pages on the same site. If a specific service page has been “live” for a long time and ranks high in SERP (you can see this in GA4 or other analytics tools), you should probably keep it. You can, however, update it with new links, new statistics, and timely references. We provide content creation, which includes rewriting website pages, as one of our many services at SEO Design Chicago.
Your decision to rewrite or redesign a page should only be made if the page will remain relevant and useful if given a makeover. Pages that have lived on a site for some time usually are linked to from another site. If your page is linked from another site, don’t remove it. Rewrite it. You can see if your page is being linked to through analytics reports.
Redirect them
From an SEO perspective, you want to redirect any links that are broken. A broken link shows a 404 error. You’ve seen it a lot. This is when a page loads and it says 404 pages are not found. Google doesn’t like sites with a lot of broken links. So you either want to remove pages with dead URLs, or redirect them to another page. This means when someone goes to a URL for a page that no longer exists, they are sent to another page that is live using what’s called a 301 redirect.
Remove them
If you need to remove pages on your site, you can delete them. That said, the URL may live on in Google’s index, which will result in people getting the dreaded 404 error.
There are ways to remove web pages from Google search and Google’s index. You can always add a “noindex” tag on the page and remove it from your sitemap. If you don’t know how to do this, we can do it for you.
Another alternative is to insert a canonical tag on the page you want removed from Google’s index. This is best for a page that has the same content as another page. This canonical tag sends a signal to Google that they should be indexing that other page instead. We can teach you about each of these methods in consultations, or just handle the issue for you as part of your website maintenance.
If you don’t do something with pages, users will get a 410 or 404 code if they try to access the page. Here’s what that means.
410 Pages
A page that returns a 410 response tells search engines that the page is permanently gone. Furthermore, it sends a signal to Google that the page is not coming back and that Google should not try to crawl it again.
Google will remove pages from a website that return a redirect 410 from their index. The good part of a 410 page is that it requires no effort on your part, and Google won’t show people it after one person finds it. The bad part is you’ve irritated, and perhaps permanently lost, that customer.
You need to make sure pages that end up with 410 codes aren’t linked to from anywhere else on the website. We do link audits of websites where we maintain websites.
404 Pages
You might be familiar with a 404 error, which is the code that greets you whenever you’ve clicked on a broken link. It’s the most common type of error. It means the page you wanted to view is no longer there.
When a 404 error is given, Google will keep sending users to the page. You want to redirect any pages with 404 errors to other pages.
Removing Images from Google Search
Photos that have been removed from your site are not instantly removed from Google search image results. If an image was indexed before it was removed from your website, Google might continue to display it in search results until it updates its index to reflect the change. This can hurt you if you don’t want people to see an image anymore, especially if clicking on an image leads to a page with an error code.
The deleted image will eventually be removed from search results, but the exact time it takes for Google to do this can vary. If you’re concerned about the image showing up in search results during this period you can speed the removal process by making a request with Google to delete it.
How to Delete a Webpage
You don’t want your site returning 404 error pages. The best and easiest thing to do for a 404 is to redirect users to the next best page that satisfies their search intentions. You do this by redirecting the page with a 301 redirect.
For example, if a product is no longer in stock, you could redirect the page with something similar.
The last resort should be redirecting to the homepage. That confuses people. If they thought they were landing on us, a homepage will confuse them and they’ll leave the site.
Setting up a 301 redirect for a page that ranks high in SERP is great because it keeps any link equity the page has so your domain can still receive credit for those links.
Whenever a page no longer exists, we want to make sure that the users don’t land on it, as that creates a poor user experience. When users have a poor experience, they leave them site. They may still want something, so they may visit your competition to see if they can find what they want there.
One of the most common situations in which you’ll need to redirect your pages is when you’re redesigning your website. When we redesign a site, we don’t just think about visual issues. We think about what to do with pages that are outdated or no longer needed. We revise them or redirect those pages. And we take specific steps so Google knows what to show users.
Reach out to us if you want to discuss what to do with pages on your site that you no longer want users to find.
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