Deleted/Merged Content on Site Migration

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Hey Moz Community!

Looking for some input on a site migration.

When redirecting some old pages that aren't going to be moved over to the new site, do you prefer to redirect to a homepage (or similar page) or to throw up a 404/410 on the new site?

What have you found works best?

[adamxj2]

Hello!

The pages that will no longer be available after the site is migrated will go directly to a 404. In doing similar site migrations, I have seen that the 404s will eventually not be crawled by search engines. I will typically make a really good 404 page in order to reduce bounce rate and improve click through.

On the other hand, If there are a ton of pages that are not being moved, I would suggest doing 301 redirects. Too many crawl errors (404s) will hurt search engine ranking. If you are redirecting, they should go to a relevant/closely related page.

Good luck

[customerparadigm.com]

If you want to keep any SEO value from inbound links that go to any of those older pages, you'll want to 301 redirect them to a similar page (i.e. a top category page).

According to Rand Fishkin's Moz blog writeup, Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?
http://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

"When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It's OK to let it 404."

According to Moz's Redirection SEO Best Practice:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
... you want to use a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved permanently.

Here's a post that describes how to create a more SEO friendly migration, here's a great info graphic:
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Hope this helps!
Thanks,
-- Jeff