| Design / Usability |
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Handling Obsolete URLsDr. Ralph F. Wilson, Wilson Internet Rocklin, CA - May 18, 2005 |
Our website was upgraded recently, changing many of the internal URLs within our domain. The search engines still show the old URLs, now dead links. Is there a way to remove these old links from search engines?" -- Khalid Zughaibi, GulfBase.com
Though the dead links will gradually disappear, you should be able to get search engines to drop the old URLs by following instructions given by the search engines, such as:
- Google: http://www.google.com/remove.html
- Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-03.html
However, you may be wise to investigate whether other websites have links to your internal webpages. If they do, you can ask them to update the URLs on their website -- often a lost cause if you have many of these links. You can ask your webmaster set up your website configuration file to make an automatic transfer from the old to the new page. Perhaps the easiest way to handle this is to set up an automatic redirect page at the old URL, so if anyone comes to the old page, he is transferred to the new URL. Redirect pages contain between the <HEAD> tags the following meta refresh tag:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.domain.com/newurl.htm">
Use this exact syntax. The numeral after content=" and before the semicolon indicates the number of seconds before the visitor is transferred to the new webpage.
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