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One of our sites has some old & completely irrelvant blog articles that are high ranking & receive the top two visited pages for the entire site (more page views than the homepage even). Our marketing managers are wanting to take down the blog posts since they are falsely inflating their traffic numbers with irrelevant visitors. I'm concerned by taking them down and re-directing to another site it will affect our overall domain authority and rankings for relevant keywords. Thoughts and/or resources on taking down vs. keeping up?

Over the last few years, my company has acquired numerous different companies -- some of which were acquired before that. Some of the products acquired were living on their previous company's parent site vs. having their own site dedicated to the product. The decision has been made that each product will have their own site moving forward. Since the product pages, blog articles and resource center landing pages (ex. whitepapers LPs) were living on the parent site, I'm struggling with the decision to 301 vs. rel=canonical those pages (with the new site being self canonicaled). I'm leaning toward take-down and 301 since rel=canonicals are simply suggestions to Google and a new domain can get all the help it can to start ranking. Are there any cons to doing so?