Best Practice for Deleting Pages

[Trupanion]

What is the best SEO practice for deleting pages?  We have a section in our website with Employee bios, and when the employee leaves we need to remove their page.

How should we do this?

[shandaman]

Remove it and also update your sitemap to reflect the change. I know in Google webmaster tools it will allow you to block certain pages from now being crawled.

[NickPateman81]

It sounds like it's just a simple case of deletion? In this case, set up a 301 redirect so that it points to the employee bios 'home' page. That way any links that were pointing to the removed page will have their 'juice' moved to a page that does exist. Although with the content not being the same, the amount of PageRank passed is dubious but still worth doing.

If you do a 301 then you wouldn't have to worry about updating HTML sitemaps. But Bing does openly admit that they hate untidy XML sitemaps (i.e. URLs that include 301s, 302s, 404s etc) so I would clean that up - and probably do the same for Google too while I'm at it.

Personally, as an SEO (with varying degrees of tunnel vision) I wouldn't want to ever delete content.

[shandaman]

Normally I would agree Nick but he already stated the employees have left the company, leaving content about them on the site is not proper business.

[NickPateman81]

There's always a way. Perhaps I would unlink it from the employee bios and whack on a noindex,follow meta tag to ensure it still passes rank if it was being linked to. This way users would never find it.

But more often than not I would just 301 unless for some reason there was a bunch of PageRank that would get lost in a redirect to an irrelevant(ish) page.

[Trupanion]

I would rather delete the page, but I just hate having Google/Bing seeing 404s for a while.  I would redirect but don't want to duplicate content pages.

[NickPateman81]

Hey Brent,

Bing and Google won't see a 404 if you redirect. There also wouldn't be an issue with duplicate content - what exactly are you referring to here?

Speaking of 404s... your avatar is doing one.

[Goetzman]

Any negatives to using 301 on something like this?

[shandaman]

This is why I suggested the Google webmaster tools.

Bing has a similar tool aswell.

[dlrPaul]

Why don't you 301 to either the main bio entry page or create a page for deleted empoyees (kinda like a custom 404) and update your sitemap. That way no benefit is lost and anyone landing on the page from say an external link, will not get frustrated.

[NickPateman81]

I think that's a great idea! Having a custom 404 for deleted employees would be great for branding purposes and general web 2.0 friendliness - I'm sure SEOmoz would agree.

However from a strictly SEO point of view, removing the content and replacing it with 404esque material wouldn't help. However my comment(s) is pretty much a moot point given that there is almost certainly no SEO value on this page anyway. But I guess I'm just a principles kind of guy.

[dlrPaul]

I agree that it would serve little or no positive gain in terms of SEO, however, for usability and customer friendliness it should be a win-win.

Without our principles, where would our industry be?

[moldybacon]

I'd just 301 it to your homepage, seriously doubt it would be worth the effort doing anything else unless this employee was famous and getting links from all around the web.

If you must, you could always do what others have suggested and write a nice "no longer working with us (content rich page) " and 301 all past employees pages to it.

[KeriMorgret]

Brent, we'd be interested in hearing what you chose to do in the case with the employee bios, and if you encountered anything unexpected.

[Trupanion]

What we decided to do was a process for each deletion along with setting up a 301 redirect for any missing or incorrect bio to our Bio's home page.

First, we will remove the bio from the XML sitemap and resubmit the sitemaps.

Second, we wait a couple of days then delete the actual bio page from our site.

So far this seems to be going alright.