I used my domain in the past as a personal blog/journal. Now I’ve decided to use it for my portfolio (instead of registering a different domain) because it’s more suited for that purpose. So I’ve deleted the old blog from the domain and now I’m setting up the basic SEO for the domain in Yahoo Site Explorer (I’ve done Google WMT). I can see in YSE that the old URLs from the old blog is still showing up for the domain. So I’ve been trying to delete them but it’s not happening which I suspect is because I’ve deleted the blog.
My question is, will these old URLs disappear and be replaced in Yahoo once I get the new portfolio site up and running and submitted? Or is there something else I have to do?
If the site is properly configured to give a 404 error in response to a hit on a missing page, they should eventually disappear.
The answer is yes, when you setup your domain name to new portfolio site, then your old URLs will be replaced with new one.
It should do it automatically, but some servers don’t. If you’re using cPanel on Apache you’re probably OK, but to be sure, first click on the page in the SERPs to ensure there is at least one hit on it, then go to AWStats and scroll right down to the bottom. Click on the ‘404’ link and make sure the page you clicked on is listed. If it is, you’re OK, and the server is correctly giving a 404 for missing pages.
Okay, how would I go about making sure the site is properly configured to do that? I always thought the Apache server (I use cPanel on Apache) would automatically do that?