One of my new clients recently migrated, with that we discovered heaps of products pages that are no longer available, some of these pages are 10 years old. However, there are 1000s of unique referring domains which were linking to these 404/410 old pages.
Obviously the concern is as these pages 410 the PageRank is lost, we have since redirected these pages.
My concern is that Google is no longer going to be crawling the pages that are 10 years old either the internal or referring URLs.
What would be the best way to submit these pages to Google so that they are able to identify the link between the new and old pages.
Alternatively, if there was a way to have Google index external URLs they could follow the links back to my client's website.
I considered uploading a sitemap, however, I don't think this can be done via a txt file anymore? My colleagues are also concerned this could be viewed as malicious as none of the pages 200.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
Obviously the concern is as these pages 410 the PageRank is lost, we have since redirected these pages.
My concern is that Google is no longer going to be crawling the pages that are 10 years old either the internal or referring URLs.
What would be the best way to submit these pages to Google so that they are able to identify the link between the new and old pages.
Alternatively, if there was a way to have Google index external URLs they could follow the links back to my client's website.
I considered uploading a sitemap, however, I don't think this can be done via a txt file anymore? My colleagues are also concerned this could be viewed as malicious as none of the pages 200.
Does anyone have any experience with this?