Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?

[JeanYates]

Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place?

Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page.

But the old pages are still visible to google's bot.

Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary?

Thanks!

Jean

[RuthBurrReedy]

50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize.  Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?

I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.

Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"?  Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet.  Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page?  Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page?  Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.

Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page.  Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.

[KristinnD]

This is an interesting question. If you are not moving domains, then I would just leave the old pages as is and put a link to the new page on each of the old pages saying that there is more updated info there, thereby passing along the link juice. Since the new page is not a duplicate of any of the old pages, then no 301 required. At least that is how I am seeing it.

[JeanYates]

So do you think google will take me back and show my site in its organic listings again?  The new pages are nowhere to be found today, even though they were in good positions a few days ago.

The site has been up since 1998, I have fresh content, lots of Facebook activity, regular blog entries, etc etc.

Thanks!

[KevinBudzynski]

Once the organics show the new url, I wait aprox 90 days to remove. However, if you have many inbound links to the old pages, I would consider keeping them longer.