Answer : I'm happy that you have taken the positive approach of developing good content for your site. You will realize that it is the single most successful way to eventually pull traffic. If you have great content that is optimized for the search engines, people WILL come to your site one way or the other.

My first advice would be to replace your old content with the new content on your existing pages. If your existing pages have a decent PageRank, this will far out-weigh the benefit you would derive by putting up the new content on optimized file-names and directory names.

Having said that, indeed, there are valid instances where the existing files need to be phased out and new files need to be added. The best way to harvest traffic from such old pages is to place '301 - Moved Permanently' commands from the old pages to the new pages. Your Webmaster or server administrator or your web host will know how to do this on your server.

This way, even if a user clicks on an old page that is ranking well in the search engine, it will lead her to the new content pages. Note that this is not a conventional redirect used in doorway pages. The conventional redirects trigger at the user 'browser' level, where as 301 redirects work on the server level. 301 redirects are a legal way of telling the search engines that the content has been moved to a new location so there is no attempt to 'fool' the search engines or the users. When the search engines re-index your site, they will acknowledge your 301 redirects and drop the old pages from their index in favor of the new content.

A good way to find a list of pages you need to address is by finding your search engine saturation. Search engine saturation is a term used to indicate all the pages of your website that exist in a search engine's index. You can use a command - "allinurl:yourdomain.com" (without the quotes) in Google to get a list of pages it has indexed from your site.

I would also encourage you to place links to your new content from your home page and your site-map page to help search engines fine and index your new content easily. You should also have a customized '404 File Not Found' page developed for your site, just in case some legacy broken links show up in user navigation or through the bookmarks people keep. The simplest way to do this is to serve your site-map page instead of serving the default 'ugly' 404 file. Ask your webmaster or web host to set this up for you.


Answers by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more advice on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net