Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ?

Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to.

Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ?

I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Dana,

If the page has incoming links from external sites I would 301 the page and keep the link juice (If it is similar content). However, if the page has no incoming links other then internal I would delete the page and I would also 404 the page in the robot.txt file. By doing this you actually spread more link juice on your existing pages.

Link Juice in most cases spreads from the home page because people naturally link to it. The more pages you build on the site the more you spread that juice. However, many pages may have been deep linked to by users on your site giving those pages there own value, to avoid losing this value you can 301 the page.

Hope this helps..

[A_Q]

As long as your reasons for doing such redirects are legitimate then there is no problem. It is perfectly natural for pages to move, particularly on an eCommerce site and all you are doing is aiding Google with finding where it has moved to. Not only that, but you are also carrying forward some of the link benefit to the old page (not all).

If you're concerned about the type of page you are redirecting to then ask yourself what a user's reaction would be to landing on that page. I'd say that if it isn't natural to redirect an old page to a new product page then redirect it to its parent page or your website's homepage.

I hope this helps.

Elias