Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
-
Hi Moz Community,
I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons).
The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic.
My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?)
I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure.
Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
-
Thanks so much for your feedback!
-
Hi Tara,
Since you already placed a 301 redirect from the old post to the new one, then you're all set and there is no need to delete the old posts because as soon as you, or a crawler, access the old page,s you'll be redirected to the new ones without "seeing" the old content.
If you are referring to deleting the content from your CMS, then you can go ahead and do so as they are not accessible anymore. Just make sure that the 301 redirects are still in place.
-
Deleting a post on your site should always be your last resort and 301 redirects are used as a way to remediate the damage that the deleted post would make.
Now, what would be appropriate in your case will depend on the type of website and post. If the post is ranked on google and has backlinks, it would be more beneficial to you to keep both the post and the page and to add a link to the page from the post, while keeping differences between both posts content and meta so that they are not marked as duplicate.
Otherwise, if your posts aren't put on a separate directory p.e. "/blog/post-name" and the title is SEO-optimized, you can just add the extra content and convert it to the page while keeping the previous backlinks and content.
If the old post doesn't have any backlinks, does not rank and has a URL that will be different from the page that you are looking to create, then the best solution would be to create a 301 redirect. After creating the redirect, the post will not be accessible by users or crawlers so you can go ahead and delete the old post.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
[email protected]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages with 301 redirects showing as 200 when crawled using RogerBot
Hi guys, I recently did an audit for a client and ran a crawl on the site using RogerBot. We quickly noticed that all but one page was showing as status code 200, but we knew that there were a lot of 301 redirects in place. When our developers checked it, they saw the pages as 301s, as did the Moz toolbar. If page A redirected to page B, our developers and the Moz toolbar saw page A as 301 and page B as 200. However the crawl showed both page A and page B as 200. Does anyone have any idea why the crawl may have been showing the status codes as 200? We've checked and the redirect is definitely in place for the user, but our worry is that there could be an issue with duplicate content if a crawler isn't picking up on the 301 redirect. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Welford-Media0 -
Page authority old and new website
Dear all, I tried to find this question using the search option but cannot find the exact same problem. This is the thing: I launched a new website in January, replacing our old website that did pretty good in the SERPs. The old website is still running on a subdomain old.website.com and the new website is on www.website.com (www.denhollandsche.nl) Both sites are indexed by google right now, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. For our main keyword, the page on the new website has an authority of "23" and the exact same page (some minor differences) on the old website still has an authority of "30". Both currently are on the second page of google while some time ago, they where still on position 2/3/4. My question is: if I would take down the old website and make a 301 redirect for the old page with P/A 30, to point to the new page with a P/A 23, will the p/a of this new page take over the P/A of the old page? What effects can I expect? The reason the old website is still running is that google images still shows images from old.domain.com in stead of images from the new website... Thanks for your help guys!
Technical SEO | | stepsstones0 -
Is 301 redirecting all old URLS after a new site redesign to the root domain bad for SEO?
After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
301 redirects and Dynamic URLs
I just ran my first diagnostic and one of my primary immediate problems are duplicate titles and duplicate content. My guess it that because the root URL http://sitename.com (which has not yet been redirected to www...) has generated an entire tree of content which is identical to the tree rooted at http://www.sitename.com. QUESTION: Do I need to do a redirect simply for the root url (sitename.com -> www.sitename.com) or do I now need to develop specific 301 redirects for each of the sub-nodes/pages? ie sitename.com/?q=about-us -> www.sitename.com/?q=about-us sitename.com/?q=our-team -> www.sitename.com/?q=our-team etc.
Technical SEO | | Barrycliff680 -
301 redirect
What is a proper way to redirect any url containing a give word (anywhere in the url) to another sepcified url? Is it like this? RedirectMatch 301 ^thisword$ http://domain.com/newlocation
Technical SEO | | sesertin1 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site
I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0