Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
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tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog?
We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good.
So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed.
So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
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Thanks, this is very helpful. I love the idea of having the new blogger write posts about the same topics thereby getting some much more engaging content at the URLs that already have traffic coming in.
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If this was my site, I would look at analytics to see if any of the old posts are bringing in traffic, then ask your current blogger if he/she sees topics that will be useful and that he/she is excited to write about, then improve those pages without changing URL.
After that is done, if this was my site, I would 301 redirect the pages that will be deleted to the homepage of the blog.
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