I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem.

I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page names, maintain legacy extensions, etc. But there are still pathing and page name changes that will need to be addressed, for these mod-rewrite is the tool.

Stephan Spencer has recently posted an excellent two-part article on the subject, see:

• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1)
• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 2)

Past articles on the subject include:

• Launching a new Website / Changing an existing one
• Mod Rewrite Rules for Uniform Spidering
• Never delete or rename a page…
• To www or not to www, that is in the URL …

SEO 301 redirects, delete page, Joomla, rename page, SEO, sh404sef

Well, almost never… I talk about the importance of page names on my SEO page. The trick is to design your site so that you have the best page names with the right content in those pages for top organic results. But what happens if you inherit a poorly designed site, the content becomes obsolete, or a generic term like “MP3 player” is suddenly secondary to a more popular phrase like “iPod”?

In those cases, you should rename the page and use a 301 redirect (moved) or 410 (deleted) to ensure any traffic to the old page finds the new page. This is critical, unless the page has no traffic and no incoming links, you should never just delete or rename a page and move on.

Here’s a good article on 301 redirects and how to implement them.

Good 301/410 discussion here

SEO 301 redirects, deleting pages, rename page