Best Place to Redirect 301 to?

[adamxj2]

Hey Everyone!

I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...?

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[WesleySmits]

Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.

On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.

If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)

Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Absolutely agree here. Do not 301 for the sake of redirecting. Google would much rather someone landed on a good 404 page rather than to a page that had nothing to do with the original request.

Google also won't penalise you for having 404's on the site - this is commonplace and fully expected.

Have a read what Google say about it here and look at using Google's own 404 widget here.

-Andy

[mediawyse]

User experience, which of course is paramount as been mentioned above. However, what hasn't been mentioned above is the clear need to PRUNE (remove completely) from your site low-quality content for Panda reasons. I personally would not want to redirect any page that has a 100% bounce rate or an average site visit of less than 20 seconds. I'm sure if you filtered these target pages the metrics would be even worse than this.

The problem with low quality or thin content is that even a small amount on the average site will drag down a site algorithmically. Google used to view websites as books, and the best practice was to continually add pages to that book so that you had more possible targets for Google to rank and send you long-tail search traffic referrals. That is no longer the case. Instead, anything that doesn't provide a high-quality user experience is just dragging you down and that includes exactly what you stated in your question "duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content."

So what should you do with these pages? I would certainly not 301 redirect them just for the sake of "redirecting them" nor do I believe that a "custom 404 page for a previous BAD piece of content" enhances user-experience. Instead, I would urge you to remove them completely by the site via a 410 GONE redirect. Google has already publicly stated that they process 410's faster and that this is the PREFERRED best practice to ensure these pages are completely removed from the index.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your project.

[simon_realbuzz]

There was a great Moz blog post on the whole re-direct issue by Cyrus Shepard which is well worth taking a look at.

[billhartzer]

Adam, keep in mind that if that's low quality content... and you redirect those URLs to somewhere else, then you're passing any links and any potential quality factors over to the new URLs.

When Google Panda came out, keep in mind that one of the only ways to recover is to delete the low quality content from your site entirely. So why would you want to redirect that low quality content and pass that on to another URL or another site?

I agree with what the others here have said, Casey and Wesley. Think of the user experience.