What happens when you need to delete ...

[edwinnyc]

Lynn mentioned to be careful about deleting things in wordpress especially once your site has been up a while I believe and one starts deleting things from the pages or posts section causing possibly SEO problems

Anyway, I am just building and adding content as I would have done with frontpage and make corrections, additions and deletions as I move along now with wordpress I am not sure on what lynn mentioned to be careful with and how best to avoid putting myself in this position.

I have set up my site and have been adding content and not thinking about anything technical issues that can come about from adding content and then deleting it later from the pages or posts section

Right now I will be deleting a certain article I placed in posts section and will offer it as a free ebook download to collect email addresses, so now if this page is already indexed in the search engines and how do i find out if this page is indexed and once i delete from the posts what should i be concerned or what i should do not to get in trouble from this

In the future should i be more careful in how I add articles or content and then wish to delete it later for use in some other fashion other then having it there as article content.

I want to be sure how to protect myself from hurting myself in the future with deleting pages or content

When I delete things it does not get deleted completely and gets placed in general section can this also be deleted completely from general section or this is not an option with wordpress and this is why I have to be careful on how i delete things ..:>(

[allmylovecrafts]

I am not sure if you should ever delete a blog post.

I was told that could cause you problems if someone has linked to that post then you will be loosing any would be clickers. You never know who has sent or posted a link to that particular post.

I would suggest that you write a new article, with the updated info & link the 2 articles together. Edit the older article & say that you have a better offer & put the link to the new post.

It is ok for your reader to know that you have made a mistake, gained more info, or had a change of mind. Those are all things that make you human.

Sheryl Loch

[edwinnyc]

[lindastacy]

Sometimes you have to move or delete a page or post, but there are ways to deal with it.

One way is as Sheryl already suggested. Edit the page to explain where the content moved to and link to it.

You can also redirect old pages to new pages. I think it's a good idea to do this in addition to an explanation and link as above so that search engines will follow the redirect link (you can set the redirect to wait a set amount of time to give visitors time to read the explanation).

And always use a custom error page rather than your host's standard "file not found" page. Your custom page can explain how to find content that may have been moved and direct visitors to indexes, site maps, etc. That way any "lost" pages will at least give the visitor some direction.