How to properly delete a website.

March 31, 2009 10:04 PM

I think I may have made a mess while deleting my website and need some advice!

I had a website up for about 8 months and I decided that at current time, I want to focus on professional endeavors and once I get a bigger, better portfolio, relaunch a new website in a year or so. That being said, I deleted my old website and canceled my host. I was wondering what to do about the dead links that are now floating about on google. Will google eventually remove these? I tried the url removal tool, but google will not do anything, since my website link appears on a couple of third party websites. I'd really like to clean things up, as I do plan on relaunching again in the future. I also understand that the url removal tool is only temporary. So will these links eventually go away? Should I have done this differently? Any tips? Thanks!

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (5 comments total)

All you need to do is delete the site. The internets will eventually take care of the rest. Email the admins of other sites if you absolutely feel you have to.
posted by turgid dahlia at 10:08 PM on March 31

You don't have to worry about this, and you can't control it anyway. Just relaunch your site and let old links be dead links.
posted by beerbajay at 3:05 AM on April 1

You could also leave one page one your site that says "this site will be back Nov. 2009" or something like that, just to keep these links alive. Eventually you can replace the page with an automatic redirection to your new site.
posted by ddaavviidd at 6:37 AM on April 1

If another website links to your defunct site, Google cannot do anything about that. You could contact those other sites directly and ask them to de-link you, but that's your responsibility to contact them, and their choice to do as you ask.
posted by adamrice at 7:32 AM on April 1

I second ddaavviidd's advice, with an enhancement: make a custom 404 page (pretty easy to do these days; my host, Bluehost.com has the custom pages right in your root for you to edit) on your old site's domain so that any dead link will instead give the user an informative page.
posted by wastelands at 8:31 AM on April 1