How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages Not Get Penalized SEO News and Blog

How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages Not Get Penalized

Tuesday, 12 August 2008

SEOs come across this problem very often: what is the best way to get rid of lots of website pages without loosing rankings or getting into any sort of penalties? The problem may be associated with:

moving the site to a new domain;
changing a CMS;
optimization process (for the sake of better crawl rate and usability); etc.

WebmasterWorld thread discusses the issue of removing multiple low-quality pages “primarily as a benefit to the users“; and the pros and cons of the following solutions:

Using 301-redirect across the board (for all the removed pages);
Letting the removed pages return 404 header status-code (and probably block them via Robots.txt).

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