Should I Keep adding 301s or use a noindex,follow/canonical or a 404 in this situation?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi Mozzers,

I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping

The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link.

www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016

www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016

www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016

Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s  pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow?

Thanks for your answers!

[montana.marsden]

The first thing that comes to my mind is "How much link equity do these pages bring in?". I know we SEO people hate to throw away any kind of link equity but at the end of the day we're not here to make SEO awesome for it's sake alone. We want results! We want to drive those heavenly KPI's we look at everyday. If these pages have really been a thorn in your side and are taking up your time I would suggest analyzing how much you'd lose if you just left these pages out of your new domain. I'd probably just cut them loose and make your life simple. If they're worth it though do the 301 redirect and see what kind of link equity you can get passed on.

Another option is just change the source link, if you can get in contact with the website that's linking and let them know what's going on that might be a good option. That being said these events are forever old so it might be met with a "That's not worth our time, besides the event is already past." when you ask for them to be changed.

Again I think unless these pages are bringing in some great link equity vital to your website to rank for keywords that are driving results... forget about them and spend your time working on something more valuable.

-Jacob

[EricaMcGillivray]

If the pages are worth the effort of 301'ing them, I wouldn't worry about page speed for them. Besides link authority from those old pages, you should also look for traffic, since 301s are actually more about seamless experience for the people coming to your site.

[ThompsonPaul]

Regarding the speed issue, a single rewrite rule using regex with a wildcard could handle redirecting all of those old event URLs to the new event calendar directory, as it appears you wish to do. Saves a huge amount of work and cuts way down on the 301 redirects that have be parsed on each page load.

Paul

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thanks Everyone!

If I decide to not 301 what should be the best alternative for these old events?

[montana.marsden]

Before deciding not to do a 301 redirect you may want to check how much traffic volume you get from these pages. If it's not significant and for some reason you're unwilling to do a 301 redirect, I would suggest trying to get the actual links going to those pages changed to your new events page. Also you should submit your new events page to those who linked to your old events page to see if you can get link equity flowing to your new page.