Ethical SEO company - Web Designer - Emarketing Consultant - Connecticut: NYC : New Jersey

Question:

We have some dealer pages on our site.( We are a manufacturer of high end cabinet hardware). A couple of dealers are no longer carrying our line, but their profile pages have on our website have been ranked well in the search engines for their geo specific terms, plus the pages have some legacy link popularity. Should we just take these pages off line? Leave them and put a notice up with a link to the next closest dealer? Use a meta refresh? Help. Thanks.

Answer:

You could do either of the things you mentioned, except the meta refresh. (The meta refresh has been so abused, that it basically considered spam by the search engines.) However, we would recommend taking the pages off line, and setting up a .htaccess 301 redirect to the next closest dealer. So, if the page URL was /dealer-A.html, and you wanted to redirect it to dealer-B.html, the .htaccess code would look like this:

redirect 301 /dealer-A.html http://www.yourdomain.com/dealer-B.html

Now, when a user or spider tries to go to the old URL, they will be instantly redirected to the new page. In the next Google PR update, the old pages PR value should be transferred to the new page. This approach is called "preserving page rank" and is good for your search engine optimization.