Removing Blogs and 301 redirect to blog home page?

[Shawn124]

Hi,

I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess.  It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were:

• Sales(ee)

• less than 400 words

• Flat out bad blogs

When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links.  So in your opinion, what would you do?  Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page?

Thanks

[DonnaDuncan]

Seems to me if the posts were valuable enough to link to, maybe you shouldn't be getting rid of them. You should noindex or redirect them instead.

It's probably best to create a list and decide on a case-by-case basis what you want to do with them. I'd customize my 404 page to explain that a site cleanup was done on XYZ date and if you (a visitor) are here because you can't find the post you were looking for, I recommend ...  and point them to your human readable sitemap or the main blog page. Then I'd go thru the post inventory and redirect the pages with links and/or social mentions to the closest related page or main blog page. The other ones I'd noindex. Any you miss will land on the 404 page and understand what has happened.