Properly Delete a Page From Your Website

It's simple to remove a page from Content Pages. You can click the trash can (Delete) and confirm you wish to delete a page or go in and edit a page using the pencil icon and marking the page as a Draft. Both of these are a great way of making a page no longer available on the site.

What happens when you do this with the search engines is you have created an orphaned page. The link will still exist on the search engines and they will get a message of an error (404 - Page Not Found) which is a "soft fail". This soft fail can hurt your being found on the search engines.

The proper way of handling this scenario is to go into the Redirector module and telling the search engines that the page that once existed no longer exists. To do this do the following:

• Go into the Redirector Module
• Click on Add New
• For the Redirect From enter in /OldUrl/
  • Note: you don't need your web domain (e.g. https://www) in the From section
• For the Redirect To enter the new address. This address can be either on your website (e.g. /NewUrl/ or another website www.disney.com)
• For the Response Code choose 301 that this is a permanent change. If the change isn't permanent choose a 302 for being a temporary change. A 301 code will let the search engines know to update their database with the new url.
• The Description is for your reference of why you are putting this in.
• The Start Date is when you want the change to take effect.
• The End Date is when you wish the change to stop being in effect.
• You will want the Active option checked. If this isn't checked the system will not work even if the redirector falls between the start and end date.
• The Page Views lets you know how many times someone has gone to the old url and has been redirected to the new url.