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Question:
Should I redirect orphaned pages to my homepage? I have several pages with outdated information on them. Is it better to redirect these pages to the homepage or simply remove the links to them?
Submitted by Cathy T.
Answer:
Neither. Consider this: You have several pages that are most likely already indexed in the search engines and drawing traffic. They may even have some quality inbound links pointing to them.
If you have 10 such pages, each receiving 3 visitors a day, that's 900 visitors a month! Why throw all of that away just because the content is outdated?
I never simply abandon outdated pages. I update them with fresh content! Sometimes I even change the theme of the page entirely if it makes sense to do so.
For example, one of my sites had an article with suggestions for preparing for Y2K. Of course, on January 1, 2000, that page became pretty much useless.
Since the filename of the page was y2k.html, I simply changed the content to an article that I wrote on the relative lack of problems that Y2k caused. That page currently receives an average of around 400 unique visitors each and every month.
Creating new pages, getting them ranked in the search engines, and driving traffic to them are difficult, time-consuming tasks. Don't waste the ones that you already have by abandoning them.
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