Pages deletion problem

Hi,

i have redesigned my site and want to completely remove the old content want to put up new content.

I have still not deleted the old pages. I want to remove them from my site asap. but am worried about search engines penalising me for that.

So what is the best way to avoid any search engine penalties. I am not sure if i can use 301 redirect, as the page content has changed.

Can I redirect all the pages that i want to delete to site homepage. Could anyone guide how to do this.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Nishant

Keep in mind that the next time a search engine crawls you, it will automatically index all the new stuff. You could just update all that content, and then chill for a a certain period of time, and the search engines will have an updated index soon enough. If you want to keep all the old content on the server, make sure that you tell the robots not to index it in your robots.txt file.

thanks!

but do search engines penalise for deleted pages. I am going to remove, say about 200-300 pages and adding about 1000 more which are on a completely new topic.
So logically the content has not moved.

Also if i redirect a whole directory using 301 redirect to the site homepage, then will crawlers look for the pages that were previously in that directory in the site root directory? I hope i am making myself clear.

Thanks for your help.

Nishant

i've recently discovered that google has pages of
one of my sites indexed, that were deleted months ago.

all new pages are definitely indexed, which is great, but....

pages which existed over 4 months ago, and were deleted
4 months ago, are still showing up in google.

does anyone know why ???


.....i apply as many headers that would help, as possible,
ie. cache settings, expiration, ect

changing topic is not good