Thread: Can I "unpublish" pages?

I am not sure if this is the right area for this question but, my question is "Can I unpublish pages on my website?"

Robots seem to crawl these pages that I no longer use every day, people are typing in my website into search engines and these pages are popping up still.
I am also concerned that having "page not found" will be a negative effect on my rankings. My navigator bar used to have link buttons to these pages but we took the link buttons off already. Can anyone help?

Is there any good info you could put on these pages rather than removing them?

But, yes, you can remove pages by going into your cpanel (or ftp) and deleting the pages. However, it will be quite awhile before se's quit sending traffic to those pages if they are now - and during that time, people will continue to get the 404 error.

I recommend people, whenever possible, use those pages for some type of good, relevant content. Yep, remove them from top level navigation - but leave navigation then on those pages to get back to the ones you want people on. Remember - these are opportunities for you to reach the people who were finding you by whatever keywords were/are brining up these pages.

Hi,
Catch 22. Would be a good to remove the page. Which you can do in either cpanel or ftp in BV. It’s a shame (and good) that the SE’s have got you as I am not sure how long it will take to remove those links.
But you can set up a redirect to any one coming to those pages. Would work a bit like this link on my site. http://www.collectors-info.com/123456
You can set this up in c panel. But you will have to have a temp page on your site like the one you see in my one.
Its better than getting a 404 error.

OOOHPS! just seen Beth has got there.

Thank you, I found this information very helpful.

Thanks both of you very much for your help. I'm working on a temp re-direct now.