Tips on Removing Web Pages Without Damaging Search Rankings 

Cleaning up your website in order to keep it relevant is important for your search engine rankings and user experience. With that in mind, simply removing web pages—particularly those that are still receiving search traffic—can actually damage your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and harm your rankings. Here are some tips for updating your website and removing web pages without damaging search rankings—

1. Start With a Content Audit

The first thing that you need to do when updating your website is to start with a content audit. During a content audit, you’ll review all of the content on your website to determine its relevance, whether you want to redirect the content or remove the content, and to understand the amount of traffic it’s currently generating. Once you know whether or not a page is still relevant, you’ll have a few options: updating, redirecting, or removing. 

2. Consider Updating Pages

If you have a page that’s been live for a long time, it can be useful to focus on updating the page rather than redirecting or removing it. Updating the content, links, title tags, and keywords for which you’re optimizing may help to maintain favorable search rankings. 

3. Try Redirecting Before Removing

If updating a page just won’t cut it, then your other options are to redirect or remove the page. Before deciding to just remove the page, though, you should consider redirecting. When thinking about SEO, it’s important to understand that redirecting deleted or irrelevant pages will pass on that page’s equity to your new site. Review the result of the audit you conducted: is the page receiving organic traffic or backlinks? If so, then redirecting it to a relevant page is the best thing you can do for your SEO efforts. 

4. Skillfully Remove

Finally, if updating or redirecting pages doesn’t make sense for your business, then your third option is removal. There are a few different options for doing this. For example, you can remove pages from Google’s index but still keep them accessible on your site. If the page doesn’t have any link equity and you don’t want visitors to access it, on the other hand, then you can do a 410 or 404 code for removal. 

Call NUVEW for Help

Understanding your options for updating your website and removing pages without hurting your SEO efforts may feel a bit overwhelming to the non-professional. At NUVEW, our team can help. We are website design and SEO experts with years of experience. Call us today to learn more.