Spiders seeking old pages... refresh or redirect? 1

[jimoblak]

Because I am lazy or uncertain if I would go back to using them, I left the pages from a previous version of my web site on the server. Only the root index.html document was changed to introduce the new, current pages.

I just noticed in my access log that spiders from Yahoo and Google are still checking my old pages. These old pages contain old, incorrect information. Can anyone suggest how I should get the spiders to recognize the new pages without damaging my existing link popularity? The old pages are HTML. The new pages are PHP and dynamically driven (only one page... example:

http://www.mysite.com/page.php?id=23).

Here are the options that I have thought of so far:

1) In the head tag of the old pages, I can place a <meta http-equiv="refresh"...> tag to the new page or to the site index. This will probably not help the spiders as they will assume that nothing has changed in the page content.

2) In the '.htaccess' file, I can redirect the old pages to the new or to the site index. I have no idea how this will affect the way that search engines currently have my site indexed. I assume that the spiders might update their page content descriptions but they will never update the HTML filename to the new PHP filename link.

Are there other options that I have missed? Is there a preferred method between these two options?

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[sleipnir214]

Unless you need to keep the old site online, I'd just archive it somewhere outside the site's document root.

The spiders will start getting "Page not found" errors and should begin at your site's default page, slurping the contents of your new site.

If you need to keep the old site online, you might create a separate virtual server for the pages in a separate document root -- "old.yourdomain.foo" versus "

http://www.yourdomain.foo".

Then the old pages will still be available should you need them, but not available as a part of your site to the spiders



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