Remove Old Pages or content from the Google Index and 301 Redirects
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Has your site direction changed slightly? Or maybe you created a new set of pages and you want your old batch removed. I will provide a few simple tips in this short article for removing your site from google, redirecting old pages to the new pages and the best type of error pages to use.
Removing my page/s from googles index
If you have a page that is indexed by google and would like it removed you may do so by going to Google Automatic URL removal system
BUT before you do you will want to make sure your page will be accepted to remove. Your page that you want removed must return a 404 error page. This must be a real 404 error and not a custom error page. This means the page that you had up has been deleted…..
I would like to remove my entire site
First go see a doctor. After you come back and you still want to remove your site from google here is how it is done. I really don’t see why you would ever want to but that is your problem.
Edit your robots.txt file and add the following:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
How to remove an image or disallow indexing of a image in Google images To remove an image from Google’s image index, add a robots.txt file to the root of the server. Example: If you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image that appears on your site at www.yoursite.com/images/dogs.jpg, create a page at www.yoursite.com/robots.txt and add the following text:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
Or if you want all images removed from the google images index you can add the following to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image< Disallow: /
How to use a 301 redirect from your old pages to new ones
But maybe removing your pages isn’t the best idea. If you have moved from oldpage.html to newpage.html how is the best way to show google the change and transport the PageRank over to the new page?
Use a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page.
To do this put the following code into your .htaccess file in the root of your server.Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html
Use a 301 redirect to move a whole site to another location
Maybe your whole site has moved to a new location. If this is the case you may use the following code in the .htaccess file to send your whole site to another location.
Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/
Use 301 Redirect to transfer from http://mysite.com to www.mysite.com
If you care anything about Google seo you should definately redirect from http:// > www. so that google has only one version cached. To do this add the following to your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L, R=301]
Use 301 redirect to transfer from mysite.com/index.php to mysite.com
This is also something you should do if you are doing Seo for google. If you get backlinks to mysite.com and mysite.com/index.php your pagerank will be split. So to fix this add the following to your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301, L]
301 Redirect PageRank
If you want to redirect a site or page and don’t want to lose the PR you definately want to use a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect is a perminent redirection. The above examples are the best ways to redirect a site or page.
To use a 404 error page or not to use one
If you are adding a new set of pages just 301 all your old pages to the new ones. In this case don’t use 404. For a couple of reasons. First you want any traffic that still may go to that page to go on over to the new page and secondly you want the PageRank and importance of that page forwarded over to the new pages.
If you do use a 404 error page make it custom with good navigation to the rest of your site or else use the link at the top of the article to remove the page from the index.
If you found this article useful feel free to link to it and post your comments. I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
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