How do we get rid of irrelavant inbound links

[Chillibreeze]

Hi Moz Community,

We were previously doing Content services and Design services. Now, we are only into design service and we have deleted all content services related pages. Our website has many inbound links coming because of the content services pages but they are not relevant to our present service anymore.

Will this affect our credibility on google and other search engines?

We have applied 410 code to many of these old pages. We have also redirected some of them to the wayback pages. However, they still appear as one of the popular pages.

Is there any solution for this?

What can we do to do away with many of these inbound links coming to our website which are not relevant anymore to our current service?

Your advice is so much appreciated.

Thanks!

[Hurf]

If the inbound links are truly irrelevant to your company then a 410 redirect (Content deleted) is the best approach, as you're telling the search engines that you removed those pages on purpose and they should be de-indexed. A 410 should see this de-indexing happen pretty quickly (quicker than a 404, which will linger as there's a change the content was only temporarily unavailable and could return). This practice won't affect your credibility - it's simply good practice. There's no sense in redirecting them to the Wayback version of your site, either, as you simply don't offer that service any more, so the visitor is still none the wiser when they arrive there. An alternative, I suppose - if you'd like to point out that you no longer offer that service, would be to 301 redirect the remaining links to a page on your site informing visitors that you no longer carry out service X, perhaps offering a list of alternative service X providers?

My preference would be the 410 as that is best practice as 301 redirects to irrelevant pages have little or no value.

I hope that helps.

Good luck.

[Chillibreeze]

Thank you so much, Hurf. That was helpful.

On our 410 page, we did write a note saying we no longer provide content services. The only thing that bothers us is that those old links keep showing on our most popular pages even after we 410ed them many months back and they still appear on our Search Console crawl errors. I think disavowing those links is not a good idea either as they were credible back then.

So, again does these crawl errors from the old links affect our credibility on search engines? Just want to be sure.

Thanks again!