Yes, that’s tremendously helpful and it is good just to hear another opinion. There’s lots of advice out there about preserving inbound links during site redesign but I’ve never seen anyone talk about this particular situation. Strangely, though, I’m guessing it’s not all that uncommon.

Thanks again for the response and, as always, you guys keep producing some of the most thought-provoking internet marketing related content on the web…

Hmm. If I had a site with services I no longer offered with external links pointing at posts and pages, I don’t think I’d want to kill the old URLs or redirect them either, presuming the external links are good links and not coming from bad neighborhoods. You’re right that this is likely worthy of a blog post all by itself, but if it were me I think I’d keep all that stuff alive, and for the sake of the user who may arrive via external link, if it were my site, I’d probably update the page content with a note that I no longer offer those services – admittedly that answer is pretty rough around the edges because I’d have to go on a page by page and post by post basis to make final decisions on each.

Hope that helps!

David

Thanks for stopping by and posting a comment – let me see if I can concisely answer your questions:

1. Grab RSS feeds from Google blogs like the main Google blog and the Google Webmasters blog – there are others, but those will cover much of what you might want to know about. That way you can expediently see what Google is doing without taking time away from quality content creation. Also you may want to grab RSS from Search Engine Land or Search Engine Round Table, they report on what Google’s up to.

2. One should redirect to the other; use Open Site Explorer to determine which version has the most “juice” and redirect to that one.

Hope that helps!

David

Very succinctly stated pointers and a nice article.

I’m wondering: this might be beyond the scope of this article but what do you guys recommend to clients whose content has changed by virtue of a change in brand mission? In other words, on our own site we formerly offered a whole category of services (3D animation) we’ve since stopped offering. We had a lot of blog posts and pages on our site with inbound links… What to do with all those inbound links? Obviously a 301 redirect will work but where do we point those folks and for how long do we point them to a new location? Do we ever just “kill” the old URLS?

If this question is too off-topic, I understand you’re not feeling comfortable addressing it; it’s just that your article got me thinkin’…

Thanks for stopping by and adding that helpful info, I appreciate it.

Sometimes I think it’s easy for anyone to forget that the internet and related technology is really not all that old in reality, and robots need our help! – splitting link equity and risking duplicate content are exactly the main problems there, as you pointed out.

I borrowed the TL:DR from some blog post I read some time ago – I guess it’s not copyrighted so it’s likely fair game!

6 HOME PAGES – I lied in my blog post above, it wasn’t 4 home pages I originally found on one of my sites, it was 6 just like you. The horror!