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How
to retire a page
Preferred
method: Use
a Meta Refresh tag to send the visitor automatically to the new
page, or a related page.
Reason:
URLs have a life of their own; they live on long after the
actual page is gone. People bookmark pages, so if a bookmarked
page is deleted, they will encounter the dreaded “404--Page cannot
be found”
error. Search engines (such as Alta Vista and Google) may
take months to discover that your old page is gone. In the mean
time, they could be sending dozens, or hundreds, of unhappy Web
surfers to your dead URL. Spare everyone the frustration; refresh
the old page to another page.
See Sidebar to the right for creating the Refresh tag,
or manually enter the tag as indicated below.
Page
Content
Eliminate
all content from the page. In our aquatic example below, you would
not see any text or images about guppies or anything else. Don’t
worry about background graphics or colors, just make sure your
page is more or less a clean slate.
Refresh
Message
Inform
your visitors that they are being redirected to a new page. Provide
a link to the new page, on the odd chance that their browsers don’t
support the Meta Refresh tag.
You
are being redirected to the new
Guppy
Breeding Page
Please
update your links and bookmarks
Now,
test the link that you’ve provided in
the visible page, to make sure it takes you to the correct page.
Then use the same link to create the Refresh tag, either in code
(see below) or in Dreamweaver (see sidebar). You can duplicate
this file to replace other antiquated pages, but you have to make
sure that both URLs (in the Meta Refresh tag and in the page body)
go to the intended target.
FAQs
What
if a page is being eliminated, and there is no relevant file to
replace it with?
Send
the visitor to the most relevant page, which could be a section
Table of Contents or the home page for your domain:
This
page has been discontinued
You
are being redirected to the Aquaculture
Home Page.
Or
The
Aquaculture Department has been eliminated.
You
are being redirected to the WSU
Home Page.
HTML
Review:
What is the Meta Refresh Tag?
The
Meta Refresh tag is a short line of HTML code that looks something
like this:
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="2; URL=index.html">
This
tag is inserted into your HTML header, preferably after your </title>
tag. When a file uses the Meta Refresh tag, most browsers will
automatically leave such a file and retrieve the file specified
in the tag. Most HTML editors (excluding Contribute) allow you
to view and edit source code. To insert this text into your
HTML file, please see your manual for instructions.
You
will probably need to update the “CONTENT” portion of the tag,
particularly the URL. Simply put, you need to insert the URL
of the target file, i.e. the file to which you want people
to go. You can use an absolute URL:
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="2; URL=http://ext.wsu.edu/index.html">
or
a relative link:
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="2; URL=../../index.html
">
If
you aren’t sure how to make a relative link, then use an absolute
link (preferably copied and pasted from your browser’s address
field).
The
above Refresh tag will retrieve the new page after 2 seconds
(that’s controlled by the number, i.e. “2,” in the CONTENT
portion of the tag). You can increase or decrease this lag
time, but I prefer 2 seconds. If the time is shorter, visitors
might not detect the refresh, and might not know to update
any bookmarks in their browsers.
A longer amount of time could be frustrating for visitors.
Is
there anything else I need to do?
Yes.
It will take you about 60 seconds to implement, but it will
unfortunately take me longer to explain. There are
two goals here:
To make your visitors happy (they want to know what’s going
on), and to keep the search engines happy (they want to be
sure you are representing the page content accurately, and
you aren’t trying to spam their indexes).
Change
Meta Title Tag
First,
change your document’s title to “Refresh.” By title, I am referring
to the HTML title tag, <TITLE>, which is near the top of
your source code. So you might change your title from
<TITLE>WSU
Page on Breeding Guppies</TITLE>
to
<TITLE>Refresh</TITLE>
See more information on the
title tag.
Eliminate
Meta Keyword and Description Tags
If
your page uses these Meta tags, you can find them near the top
of your source code. They look a lot like this (although their
content will change depending on the page):
<META
NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="This is a cool
page about how to breed guppies for your 4-H project">
<META
NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Guppies, fish, gravid,
4H">
Not
all pages have these meta tags. But if your refresh page has
these tags, please eliminate them.
Again,
be sure that you delete all the content (information) from the
page. People should only be able to read that they are being
redirected to a new page.
What
about refreshing PDF files and other files?
I
have instructions on redirecting PDF
files on another page. For Word documents and other file
formats, you can likewise replace the old file with another file
giving the URL to the new page. |
