What to Do with Old Web Pages

So you want to clean up your website? Delete old information. Perhaps remove the content you once needed provided by others and update product or service offerings.

That’s great. But what do you do with the old web pages?

You could just delete them, but wait! How many of them have already been spidered, indexed, and listed in search engines? How many of them are already bookmarked by previous site visitors? How many were once used as entry pages for ads and advertising campaigns? Don’t just delete those old web pages. Recycle them.

You can do this several ways.

1.. Prepare new content appropriate for the page’s existing title and load it to the server. This is just as effective as deleting the page and putting up another one with the new content. But its already listed in search engines and already has traffic coming to it.

2.. Prepare a new 404 error message just for that page telling visitors the old content has been removed but you will immediately recycle or redirect them to new and improved content on your server.

3.. Rethink you plan to delete the page and its content. You created it at one time for a reason. Why get rid of it? Perhaps you just need to dress it up and re-market it.

4.. Create a mini-directory page on the now-not-needed page cataloging content related to the page’s original content. Then people who return to it via bookmarks or search engine listings will still find basically what they were looking for.

Whatever you do, don’t trash the old page. Why throw away all the marketing work that originally went into it?

Shannan Hearne is the president and wizard of http://www.SuccessPromotions.com , an online marketing services company specializing in helping small businesses take root and grow in the global internet economy.