How to best remove old pages for SEO

[JamieHibbert]

I run an accommodation web site, each listing has its own page. When a property is removed what is the best way to handle this for SEO because the URL will no longer be valid and there will be a blank page.

[NakulGoyal]

It would be best to make it a 404 or you could consider still having the property listed but mentioning it's no longer available and displaying similar / nearby / related properties on that page as long as it makes sense from both the usability / TOS and other business issues.

Think from a user's perspective. Let's say I took a URL of a property from your website and linked to it from my blog post where I am talking about my vacation or if I emailed it to friends/family. If that property is no longer available, what's a good user experience for people clicking on that link from my website or from my email. In my opinion, it might be a good idea to have a user friendly message saying that property is no longer available and displaying other related properties.

I hope that helps and makes sense.

[JamieHibbert]

I agree with the idea of the message, best user experience. Sadly people do not want their property showing, often because they change from a business to a residential property.

How do I show the page is a 404, is that a code snippet in the header or similar?

[NakulGoyal]

What platform is your website ? You could also send me the URL via PM or post here and I can check.

[JamieHibbert]

A home bodge job... url www.visitdevonandcornwall.com

[NakulGoyal]

It looks like your server is Linux possibly..Apache..running PHP.

If that's the case, you can build a page that you'd like to display for all pages that do not exist and upload it on the server as 404.php or whatever you might want to call it.

Then, add the following line in your .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

You are all set.

To me i looks like you are already set or doing this in some fashion. I checked to see if I visit http://www.visitdevonandcornwall.com/test and see what happens.

It gives me a friendly 404 and the HTTP Header is correct.

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found => Server => cloudflare-nginx Date => Fri, 11 May 2012 17:17:51 GMT Content-Type => text/html Connection => close X-Powered-By => PHP/5.3.6 Expires => Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control => no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma => no-cache Set-Cookie => __cfduid=d1b9e2169ed78a6697f752eef1c0a5ee01336756670; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.www.visitdevonandcornwall.com

[KeriMorgret]

Stephanie Chang posted on just this subject last month on the blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. Her post may help you with some ideas -- it was actually because of all of these types of questions in Q&A that she wrote the post.