Moving and removing pages

November 19, 2008

With the HTTP protocol, when a page is called from a client but not found, it is referred to as a 404 error message. For example, if you go to a made up page on the Just search site here, you will find our own custom 404 page which tells the client the page does not exist.

When search engines crawl your site they will index every available page they can find, but often you may rename or delete a page. Any page on your site which 404s will be removed from the search index and you will lose valuable rankings - after all, content is king! The best way to deal with this is to either create a custom 404 page or, if you have just moved or renamed the page, use a 301 redirect.

If you have only moved the page, you can use a 301 redirect which will tells all clients trying to access the missing page that it has permanently moved to a new location. 301 and 404 redirects are implemented in different ways depending on the server and type of server script you are using.
For more information on 404 pages you can read up on Googles enhanced 404 page.

Adrian Mursec - Natural SEO Programmer

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