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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 I've discovered thousands of pages (dating all the way back to 2009) with thin, outdated, and irrelevant content.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info easier to find, created new lead magnets, optimized images, etc.-- but we didn't bother to update 1000 pages of outdated content that no one is looking at...won't that look bad? Do you agree that we should delete/merge all outdated content now, rather than waiting until after the site redesign?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!

One of my client's biggest keyword competitors is using, what I believe to be, sneaky redirects. The company is a large, international corporation that has a local office. They use a totally unrelated domain name for local press and advertising, but there is no website. The anchor text in the backlinks automatically redirects to the corporate website. Is this sneaky or not?