301 redirects in Wordpress vs. making old posts that you no longer want your audience to see private.

[SapphireCo]

I'm working on Wordpress at the moment changing the content of a page on my website.

The page has a lot of educational information and each section is unique. I had to go through and edit each section on google documents and now I'm posting all the new pages and making the old pages private on wordpress. Is this a good idea?

I'm worried google will still crawl my private education pages and think these are duplicates since the new pages somewhat resemble the old. Also, should I be 301 redirecting all the old education pages to the corresponding new ones even if they are private on wordpress?

I understand that the 301 redirect should only be used if you want the old page to go to a new one. What i don't understand id weather this will still be relevant or work if I've already made the old page private on wordpress.

Thank You!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yes, you should 301 redirect to the new pages. Otherwise, you will lose all of the authority you built to your old pages.

Even though the page is private, Google will continue still visit the link from any links on the web/history of crawling.

[SapphireCo]

Thanks Oleg

The same hold true if I choose to delete a page on wordpress right? Or will google no longer be able to crawl a page if I delete it?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You can delete it as long as the 301 redirect still occurs.

301 signals to search engines "hey, this page has permanently moved to this new location so whatever signals you had for this page, send over to the new location and ignore any content on the old url"

So be sure to set your 301 redirects at the server level (via htaccess on Linux or via IIS on Windows servers) if you plan on deleting the page. I know yoast SEO plugin has an option to redirect to another page in their settings for the post/page (in this scenario, you wouldn't delete the post/page).