Let's Talk About Old Content And Redirect Chains - Search Engine Journal

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While looking through some questions submitted to SEJ after a recent webinar, two of them stuck out to me as related and similar.

That means you’re in for a treat, gentile reader, because today’s a special 2-for-1 version of Ask an SEO.

Here are the questions:

Ines asked: What do you do with old websites that have hundreds of URLs with very little traffic to most of them. Do you remove the bad content first? How much should I remove at a time? Is there a rule? Should I take internal links into account?

Christina asked: Is it better to redirect old content to new content if that leads to a redirect chain? Or should I just delete that content?

Let’s Talk About Old Content

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s dive into it.

I’ll get my pet peeve out of the way first: Hopefully, you have dates on this old content, so that the readers who do stumble upon it know that it’s old and outdated.

There are a couple of approaches you can take here, and a lot of it depends on your keyword research and data.

The first question I’d ask myself for any piece of content is: Is this useful? Or is it harmful (out of date, bad advice, no longer relevant, etc.)?

If it’s harmful or no longer relevant, like a blog post on how to grow your Google+ following, you can just go ahead and delete...

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