2 replies to this topic

[Drew]

I've redesigned a site for someone and it's now just a single page. Google still has pointers to the old pages, which I want to chuck. If I simply delete them, then there'll be dead links out there... I was going to put a robots.txt file in place telling engines to hit the index.htm and nothing else. Would this work?

User-agent: *
Disallow: *
Allow: index.htm

I don't have access to the server enough to create permanent redirects and such... just FTP.

Drew

[torka]

If you can't do a real redirect at the server or a custom 404, I'd suggest a zero-second meta refresh redirecting to the new one page site. I seem to recall that at least some of the SEs treat a zero-second refresh the same as a redirect.

With any luck, somebody who's tested this recently will come along and confirm this.

Are the pages straight HTML or is there any scripting language involved? If they're PHP or ASP pages, for instance, there may be ways around the lack of server access to set up a 301.

In any case, a meta refresh will ensure visitors who follow old outdated links (or bookmarks) will end up where you want them to go. The robots.txt won't help them otherwise. The alternative would be to put up static "this site has changed" pages with links to the new default page.

You can also exclude the old pages in robots.txt, of course, but I'd want to make sure the human visitors are taken care of as well.

--Torka

[Drew]

I'd already done that... I suppose that'll have to do! The pages are straight HTML and there's only a half-dozen or so.

Thanks!
Drew