REDIRECTING OLD PAGES IS IMPORTANT
As websites evolve, inevitably pages are added and pages are taken away. But what happens when the search engines have indexed that page that has gone.
When the search engines come to re-index your site, it will list the page as a 404 Error, otherwise known as Page not found. Eventually, this search result will be taken off the search engines and all Link relevance will be lost.
One way to combat this issue would be to keep the page, and inform the user the page has been moved/removed and link them to the relative page.
A much more effective way would be to redirect the user directly to the page using a "301 Redirect". The "301 Redirect" is used to permanently move a page, and with this any link equity in the search engines will be passed on, so that its place in the search engine listings will not be lost.
Depending on the hosting you are using this can be done in a number of ways. At the page level using php, the 301 redirect can be achieved by using a HTTP header. This must be called before anything is outputted to the page (eg html).
Another effective way to achieve a "301 Redirect" would be to use .htaccess function called rewrite. This can be much more powerful than the "Header" method as you can use regular expressions to determine what pages will be redirected, rather than having many pages on your server doing similar functions.
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