Using 301 & Redirecting 1000's of posts

[cheesy snacks]

Quick question - I have a 15 year old site with around 5000 very old posts going back to 2011. The posts have decent backlinks from BBC, Telegraph etc - but the articles are obsolete and gain no traffic.

I want to use the link juice from these URLs.

I'm thinking of 301' these 5000 pages back to either the homepage or a single URL.

Is this the best way to do it? thanks

[not2easy]

Whatever else you might do, do not 301 those old pages to an unrelated page. It will not provide any benefit and will displease the Google a lot. The oulde concept of "link juice" as something you can manage or sculpt is a relic. ;)

[Robert Charlton]

To second what not2easy said about this question...

I'm thinking of 301' these 5000 pages back to either the homepage or a single URL.

Is this the best way to do it?

It's the worst way to do it. Google doesn't like it because it's a bad user experience for searchers to be redirected to pages that differ from the topics they were expecting.

Google also might consider the redirection an attempt to manipulate results, which it is. I think I remember that somewhere Google specifically suggests not doing this.

Google actually prefers sites to improve old content, rather than to redirect or delete it. Depending on the type of site, a limited amount of redirection to similar content, if helpful to a visitor, might be appropriate.

If a product site, eg, it might make sense to redirect a page that wasn't too specific to the category page that covers that topic and provides linking to similar products.

Or, if the product was known and popular, it might make sense to keep the old page, but in rewritten form, acknowledging the change, and perhaps provide links to substitutes or perhaps even better new products. If you do redirect, then the new page should alert the user to the reason for the redirection.

The point is, don't deliver a bad surprise to the user in order to hold onto a link credit. Try to come up with the best experience for the user. The core of handling this situation is preserving a good user experience.

In that regard, again, the home page is likely to be such a mismatch that you simply shouldn't send the user to the page. Imagine you're in a pre-pandemic brick and mortar store and the user is trying to find something that they'd like to check out and buy. The last thing you'd want to do in such a case is to send them back to the entrance to the store and have them start hunting all over. You've gotten a potential customer to your site. Do what you can do to keep them. Google is smart enough to sort out either scenario.

Other types of sites, events, technology, etc, will have analogous situations, and you need to sort it out in the best way to keep the customer happy.

You might also want to check your stats to see which of these pages has gotten any traffic recently. Google may well have deprecated the link value if it's not bringing traffic, but that's just a guess.

...very old posts going back to 2011. The posts have decent backlinks from BBC, Telegraph etc

Note also that it's the nature of news publications that their links lose value as they lose freshness and the pages get buried deeper in the site structure. In this case, the links might not really have the value you think they might. Again, this is where you might check stats, just to look at traffic. On these pages, you might just remove the pages with a 410 status, and make sure you have a decent search function built into a custom error page.

Custom error pages, btw, should never use relative linking internally, as their nav and internal linking will fall apart if the queried page doesn't match the relative link structure. I know that absolute linking in an error page will hold up. I believe that root relative linking will, but it's been a while since I've cobbled one together, so you might want to double check.

[not2easy]

Thank you @Robert - to quote from the horse's mouth:

If your page is no longer available, and has no clear replacement, it should return a 404 (not found) or 410 (Gone) response code. Either code clearly tells both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist. You can also display a custom 404 page to the user, if appropriate: for example, a page containing list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page.

If your page has moved or has a clear replacement, return a 301 (permanent redirect) to redirect the user...

Why does it matter?

Returning a success code, rather than 404/410 (not found) or 301 (moved), is a bad practice. A success code tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, the page may be listed in search results, and search engines will continue trying to crawl that non-existent URL instead of spending time crawling your real pages.

-- [support.google.com...]

Think of how people actually searching for the old content and landing on a totally different page than they searched for might react. Whatever else they do, they would probably try to avoid that "new" site.

If you have any doubts about how to manage a custom 404 document that might include links, do a search here using the search function (upper right on desktop) for "custom 404" and that should help. An old (2007) page here covers the basics: [webmasterworld.com...]