Deleting Outdated News Pages??

[JCon711]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently doing a full content audit for my company, in preparation for a website redesign. I've discovered thousands of pages (dating all the way back to 2009) with thin, outdated, and irrelevant content. ie: real estate news and predictions that are now super old news.

According to analytics, these older pages aren't receiving any traffic, so I think the best course of action is to delete these pages & add 404 redirects. In my opinion, this should be a big priority, because these pages are likely already hurting our domain authority to some extent & it's just a matter of time before we're really penalized by Google. Some members of my team have a different opinion -- they worry that deleting 1000 pages could hurt our rankings, and they want to wait and discuss the issue further in 3Q or 4Q (once the site redesign is completed and we have time to focus on it).

Am I wrong to think that waiting is a very bad idea? Google will notice that we've done a major site redesign--we've written all new copy, optimized the UX & content organization to make info easier to find, created new lead magnets, optimized images, etc.-- but we didn't bother to update 1000 pages of outdated content that no one is looking at...won't that look bad?

Do you agree that we should delete/merge all outdated content now, rather than waiting until after the site redesign? Or am I overreacting?

Thanks so much for your help!

[GlobeRunner]

As EGOL suggests, if the pages haven't received any traffic in the past year or so, then they most likely are dead weight and  you need to get rid of them. I would, however, do two things:

• Review all the links to your website and 301 redirect any news articles or URLs that have links pointing to them. You'll want to make sure that you keep any links that you have pointing to those pages.

• Rather than use a 404 error on those pages when you remove them, I would use a '410 gone' error to indicate to Google that they're no longer present, have been removed, and they need to remove them from their index.

[EGOL]

I've discovered thousands of pages with thin, outdated, and irrelevant content. ie: real estate news and predictions that are now super old news.....  these older pages aren't receiving any traffic...

I would delete them and if the job is easy, redirect them.  If they are not easy to redirect I would allow them to 404.

In my opinion, they are right now dead weight and could get you a Panda problem.

I have deleted thousands of similar news pages from my site.  We did it every year or two.

I doubt that deleting them would hurt anything.  I would do it if this was my site.  It might increase the rankings if you have a current Panda problem or if they are sucking too much linkjuice.