A question for SEO experts

I am thinking to delete all of my pages in my site. Its autoblog with copy/paste content.i just want to delete old copy/paste contents and i want to add unique articles to my site.

if i delete these pages, google will penalize me ? and i am thinking to change theme.

What do you think guys ? does google will penalize me ?

I think you should open up your sitemap and make a list of all of the web pages you plan on deleting.

Take that list and create a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file for those soon-to-be deleted pages.

Redirect those pages to your newly created unique articles or simply to your homepage.

Once your 301 redirects are placed in your .htaccess file I would go ahead and delete those pages.

When big G crawls it will automatically detect the changes and will not penalize you for 404 errors. You'll even get some PR flow from the old to the new (though not all).

I think this is the best way to avoid the deleted content penalty and keep your website happy in G's eyes.

If your site is having duplicate content then its not a good thing - go ahead and delete all duplicate content and add unique content to your site.

Yes! Use redirects like robotluv has mentioned.

robotluv said:

I think you should open up your sitemap and make a list of all of the web pages you plan on deleting.

Take that list and create a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file for those soon-to-be deleted pages.

Redirect those pages to your newly created unique articles or simply to your homepage.

Once your 301 redirects are placed in your .htaccess file I would go ahead and delete those pages.

When big G crawls it will automatically detect the changes and will not penalize you for 404 errors. You'll even get some PR flow from the old to the new (though not all).

I think this is the best way to avoid the deleted content penalty and keep your website happy in G's eyes.

Click to expand...

how can i redirect with .htaccess ? please can you help me about this ?

Thanks,

Sadly, I can't post URLs in here. I'm too new.

You simply add a line to your .htaccess file for each web page you want to redirect.

This is assuming two things though:

1) That you're using an Apache web server

2) That you have access to your .htaccess file

Download your .htaccess file onto your computer, and open it up in a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++.

You simply add the lines in there.

How to find the lines you add to your .htaccess file?

Search Big G for "htaccess 301 redirect" and you will find it. Look for the 7th result from askapache. It's the one I was going to show you.

How to confirm that your .htaccess redirect is fully functional?

You will need to check your HTTP header responses to see if they are returning a 301 instead of a 200 or 404. To do this you search big G for "http header check" and use something like the website Web Sniffer to query your old web page and see if it is returning a 301. That's the same way that the search spiders do it.

abernok said:

I am thinking to delete all of my pages in my site. Its autoblog with copy/paste content.i just want to delete old copy/paste contents and i want to add unique articles to my site.

if i delete these pages, google will penalize me ? and i am thinking to change theme.

What do you think guys ? does google will penalize me ?

Click to expand...

You could make your old content unique by spinning them and should eliminate any duplicate content penalty.

If you still want the traffic and the link juice benefits....do the re-directs like the above poster mentioned. If you don't really care about the traffic, then yes, you can delete them. Google will not penalize you, provided that the deleted pages don't share descriptions and titles with the new pages. I know from experience...I've done this a couple of times. I've converted from a .php based site to an .html site and got rid of a lot of stuff to test what worked better for one of my sites. The result was a lot of .php pages that were indexed by Google that no longer existed. The hosting account didn't exist for that matter either. Switched from a linux to a windows hosting account. Google will de-index them eventually, don't worry. If you're keeping the same hosting account, and just changing the pages on the site and such though, do the redirect, because it will only benefit you. Hope this helps.

Thanks robotluv.. decent tips here..