“WEBSITE 301 REDIRECT”
A “301 Redirect” is the permanent moving of a web page from one location to another. These can be beneficial to you for two reasons: to use the value and redirect old posts to new ones.
For instance, say you have a URL that still holds value since it has a number of quality links pointing to that page. With a “301 Redirect” you’ll tell search engines and visitors there’s a better or newer version of this content elsewhere on your site. The “301 Redirect” automatically sends people and Google to this page.
Or, say you have an old post of a specific dog breed but you want to delete it. The logical next step is to redirect your post to a newer post about this dog breed. If you don’t have that post, then choose a post about the closest breed possible. Redirecting to a relevant category might be an option in some cases, but this should not be standard practice. Also, redirecting to the homepage should be out of the question, this is a typical SEO anti-pattern.
Overall, Creating a 301 Redirect (for instance in WordPress) isn’t hard, but doing it with Yoast SEO Premium is easy as pie. If you don’t have it yet, find out about all the extras here.
TELL SEARCH ENGINES THE CONTENT IS INTENTIONALLY GONE
Sometimes, you may not have a relevant page on your site to redirect to. In this case, it’s wise to tell Google to forget about your old post entirely by serving a “410 Deleted” status to Google. This status code will tell Google and visitors the content didn’t just disappear; you’ve deleted it for a reason.
Usually, when Google cannot find a post, the server will show a “404 Not Found” status to the search engine’s bot. You’ll also find a 404 crawl error in your Google Search Console for that page. Eventually, Google will work itself out, and the URL will gradually vanish from the search result pages.
In total, The 410 is more powerful since it tells Google that the page is gone forever, never to return. You deleted it on purpose. So, Google will act on that faster than with a 404. Read up about the server status codes if you need more guidance on this.
Keep reading: How to properly delete a page from your site »
DO YOU HAVE OLD CONTENT YOU WANT TO DEAL WITH?
Cleaning up old content should be part of your content maintenance routine to keep your website fit and looking fresh. If you don’t go through your old posts regularly, you’re bound to run into issues sooner or later. You might show incorrect information to visitors, potentially hurt your own rankings by having too many pages about the same topic. This could increase the chances of keyword cannibalization, which is a lot of work to find and fix later on. Therefore, filter through your old posts and decide what to do: update, merge or delete.
Clean up your orphaned content with Yoast SEO Premium
A great place to start is with your orphaned content, which is content on your pages or posts that have zero internal links to them. You might be surprised, but most of us have orphaned content on our website. This means that you might be missing out on a great place in the search results, and lots of traffic.
To help you clean up your old content, we’ve created an SEO workout that identifies your pages and posts that don’t have any links and walks you through four simple steps to fix them. These steps allow you to decide whether you want to update or delete a certain page. When you do decide to update it, it will suggest pages or posts from which you can link to this updated content. This, in return, will help you fix your orphaned content and update it at the same time.
You will need Yoast SEO Premium if you want to use this workout!
If you’re not sure whether you’re managing your site’s content well enough right now, we also have a content SEO fitness test that tells you if your content needs some more work to get SEO fit. Make sure to give it a go and find out where you stand. Good luck cleaning up!
Congratulations! You have just been taught a detailed Byter guide on cleaning up old content. Now all you need to do is keep is filter through your own content, and decide which one of our steps you will follow. Have fun! Also, don’t forget to let your
