: Website re-launched in phases - where to redirect old links to pages not in current phase? When performing a phased re-launch of a website what's the best practice for dealing with links to

@Berumen354

To answer your question: create a temporary page in the new site (just one) with a message to the website users and webmasters saying that this linked page will be restored soon.

SEO technique: make a URL inventory with all the pages in your old website. Identify the ones that have links pointing to them and create a 302 Redirect to the page you just created. The purpose is not to return a 404 error back to your old website users and webmasters. Also, you will let the bots know that the page(s) has been temporary moved.

This is really important, assuming that all the old website URLs has been indexed and you don't want search engines to think that the page is gone or have been replaced by a lower quality non related page.

Follow google guidelines to move your website paying special attention to steps #2 and #5 in regards to the robots.txt file.

Of course, you will be replacing 302 Redirected URLs with 301 redirects as you move all the sections of the website.

Hope this helps. Cheers

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@Goswami781

Very good question.

Let me explain by example. Let's say there is site A with 80 pages and you created a new version, site B and it has got only 40 pages. And you need to make new version B live.

Best Option:
See if you can only launch partial site, meaning load new pages and leave old pages which you didn't create. This can be a tough one if you haven't planned well.

2nd Best
Load new pages and for those pages which you haven't created, just create a basic content page with minimum info. It will ensure it doesn't go to a 404 in Google's eye.

3rd Best
Identify pages with higher authority/ranking which you didn't create and see if you can create important ones with basic info and then load and remaining redirect to home page temporarily and do remaining sooner.

4th Best
Redirect remaining to the home page and create sooner so that Google will understand it was only a temporary redirect.

Note: If you redirect to home page make sure it's not permanent 301 redirects.

Hope this helps.

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