SEO Blog

When you remove a page from your website, you can’t just walk away and hope it just goes away. That page will, in all likelihood, have a number of pages linking to it – some externally, some internally. These all need to go somewhere or you’ll lose all of their benefit.

If you are looking to create a new replacement page, you might just want to temporarily lead links towards an active page on the site – most likely the homepage. This is done by inserting a 302 redirect into the coding of the site.

This will pass traffic on safely without returning the ’404 not found page’. Good news, no visitors will be confronted with a broken page. Bad news, you won’t get any of the link juice passed through.

302 commands were created to be temporary. As such, Google and the other search engines treat them accordingly. This means that any links that it has coming in or is passing out will have little or no strength attributed to them.

In SEO terms, this is a disaster.

Imagine you have had your domain since 2002. You originally had 8 categories to fit in your entire product range. Recently some new lines have been added, whilst old ones have disappeared. This required you to make some changes to the categorisation of the site. You decide that a category was surplus to requirements and deleted it.

In the 8 years that this category was live, the likelihood is that it has generated its fair share of links. It will also have built up a fair amount of strength, thanks in part to its age and those links that you’ve been amassing. This isn’t something you should be so flippant about losing.

You might initially set up a temporary 302 redirect to counteract this issue – a good start. But then other jobs take over and the page gets overlooked – not so good. Preferably any page that is no longer live should be given a 301 redirect.

Whilst some link juice will leak, it will be nothing like as bad as simply removing the page or having a temporary solution. SEO is all about building links and authority within your site, therefore it is vital that your pages are all operational, or as operational as they can be.

You don’t want to have redundant pages hanging around on the site for SEO’s sake. Visitors will soon find out that there is nothing of any real consequence on offer and find another site that is better equipped to deal with their query.

So when you do come to remove pages, be they blog posts, products or services, don’t forget your 301 redirects. It’ll give the greatest benefit to both your visitors and search engine rankings, plus it is straightforward to do. So, as you might guess, you don’t have any excuses for not implementing your 301 redirects and getting rid of all those old 302s.