Best practice around removing large section of the website

[webactive]

We are looking at removing a large section of our website that is getting low/no traffic.

My current thought of removing this would be to delete the pages and add 301 redirects to a similar page within the site that is not being deleted.

This will be removing 400+ pages, does it this make sense?  Or should we point them to the homepage?

Finally should we do this in one batch or should we slowly remove the pages over the course of a couple weeks.

Thanks - appreciate the help in understanding the best practice in terms of SEO.

[TomRayner]

If you're looking to redirect old URLs, sending them to the nearest equivalent page on your site makes sense and would be a good idea.

However, my question would be - Do you actually need to redirect?  If the part of your website you're looking to remove is getting little to no traffic as it is, you might be better off letting the pages 404.

404 errors are a natural part of your website - something that Google is happy to admit. If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.

The reason why I suggest this is that with each redirect you add to your .htaccess file, you add extra code that needs to be 100% correct and you make your file a little bit bigger.  The bigger it is, the longer it takes to process and the longer it takes to process, the longer it will take your site to load.  Now, for 400+ URLs we're talking small amounts here and likely nothing that will affect your site speed to a degree that it will negatively affect your site - but it can be a long process to put in place and can cause problems if you're inexperienced with redirecting.

I usually follow 2 criteria when asking if I should redirect an old URL.

1. Is it getting traffic from people visiting or entering my site?  Check this with your analytics, although it looks as though the answer for you will be no.

2. Does the old URL contain any external backlinks that you would like to preserve.  If it does, a 301 redirect will help pass on the link equity.

If the answer to both of these questions is "no", I'm happy to let the URL 404.  Over time, it will stop being crawled, reducing any errors you see in Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps - certainly no harm in redirecting if done correctly (and you can do it in one big go - personal experience with rebranding some big global sites shows this to not be a problem).  However, I would ask if you really need to - you're unlikely to harm your site either by not redirecting.