Preserving link equity from old pages

[3gcouk]

Hi Moz Community,

We have a lot of old pages built with Dreamweaver a long time ago (2003-2010) which sit outside our current content management system.

As you'd expect they are causing a lot of trouble with SEO (Non-responsive, duplicate titles and various other issues). However, some of these older pages have very good backlinks.

We were wondering what is the best way to get rid of the old pages without losing link equity? In an ideal world we would want to bring over all these old pages to our CMS, but this isn't possible due to the amount of pages (~20,000 pages) and cost involved.

One option is obviously to bulk 301 redirect all these old pages to our homepage, but from what we understand that may not lead to the link equity being passed down optimally by Google (or none being passed at all). Another option we can think of would be to bring over the old articles with the highest value links onto the current CMS and 301 redirect the rest to the homepage.

Any advice/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thumbs up!

Thanks,

[RuthBurrReedy]

There are a couple options that I see here:

• Go through the list of pages, find the most relevant equivalents on your current site, and 301 redirect them. Yes, 20,000 pages is a lot but you'll quickly fall into a groove where you find whole sections of pages that can be redirected to the same place. I did it with 65,000 or so URLs when SEOmoz moved to Moz, and it took about a month to plan out alongside my other tasks. It's tedious, but doable.
• Figure out which pages have the high-value links you want to preserve, 301 redirect those to their most-relevant equivalents, and redirect the rest to the home page. This won't work quite as well to preserve link equity or any traffic/rankings they might be getting, but it will be faster.

Either way, once you've got those redirects in place I strongly recommend taking a look at the sites that link to the old pages, and seeing which ones you might be able to reach out to to get the links updated. That way, you won't be losing link value through the 301 - plus, you might strengthen or re-establish some relationships that could result in future links. Good luck!

[3gcouk]

The problem is these old pages don't have any analytics on them.

By doing a 404 we would lose the value of the links going to them. These are very high value links in many cases. We can identify the ones with high value links though.

[KevinBudzynski]

You will be most likely fine. I'm sure you will take a look at analytics and see how much traffic/conversion these landing pages are getting and prioritize. If some of the pages are irrelevant (not contextually relevant anymore), no logical alternative and no traffic you may consider sending them to a 404 page w/search. Good luck!

[GlobeRunner]

Whenever you have old pages on your site (on the same domain name), using a 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect them to the most appropriate page on your site is what you should do. As long as you're 301 redirecting one URL to another on the same domain name, you won't lose any link equity.

So, the best thing for you to do is to 301 redirect those old URLs to the best page--otherwise redirect them to the site's home page.