One of the many things the search engines use to rank your web pages is how old they are. (See the recent update at the end of this post)
All things being equal old pages rank better than new pages. Just like old sites rank better than new sites. Its all part of the what pages are considered by the search engines as an authority on a particular topic.
Those old pages you want to delete are (if you’ve been actively promoting your site) are likely to be in the indexes of the search engines. If you go deleting them people may get an error page when they click on the search engine link to get to your site. This makes you look bad.
“The page doesn’t have relevant info anymore or is outdated” you say. That is fine, just change the content on the page and leave it named the same.
Even though the content may change, what is important is the length of time it has been in the search engine index, especially so with Google.
Alternatively you can redirect people when they try to get to the old page and send them to the new one you want them to see.
Doing either of these alternatives means you’re not wasting the time an effort that has previously gone into promotion a page on your site, and of course means a good user experience rather than a poor one of potentially seeing a 404 error page.
If you’d like help working out how to best reuse an old page within your site then get in touch and we can chat about how to best do it for you.
Update:
With the recent Google search algorithm changes, “Freshness” is becoming more relevant – this relates to both new content and pages / post being added plus freshness of existing pages.
So how do keep all those blog posts or“corporate” pages fresh, when there’s no need to change them?
Do something like in this blog post – where I’ve added a an update that is relevant to the original post. It only takes a few minutes. This strategy can be applied to normal web pages too, add to the existing article, update the directions on how to find your office, add more photos of projects / job / products and include a write up to go along with these.
Go now and make some changes and keep your website content Fresh to benefit from Googles latest updates.
