How to mitigate impact of retiring 20,000 old URLs from the previous website version (migration was in 2015)

[yaelslater]

Hello!

So, we migrated our website in 2015 to the "new version" and we now have 20,000 old URLs that we'd like to officially retire. the only traffic coming to these pages is obviously from backlinks pointing at our site.

How do i gauge the hit that our website will take once we retire these URLs?

Is there a tool that will allow me to look at referral traffic numbers per URL so that i know how much traffic we'll be losing?

any advice would be helpful!

thanks!

yael

[NicoleDeLeon]

What do you mean by "retiring"?  Is there another page that you could redirect to so you don't lose the authority those backlinks are providing?

As for seeing how much referral traffic you could lose, you can use Google Analytics for that. Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.  Then in the secondary dimension, go to Acquisition > Medium.

[yaelslater]

Hi NorthStarInbound, thanks for your response.

By "retiring" i mean deleting. They're old URLs that we'd like to get rid of and just let the new pages stand on their own.

But we would be giving up the authority that those pages have accumulated. The question is, how much authority is at stake? How large of a hit are we going to take? How can we measure this?

Any advice is helpful! Thanks, yael

[NicoleDeLeon]

So as I mentioned I would never delete a page without a redirect (even if that is a redirect to the homepage).  If you do that, there will be a minimal amount of authority that you lose.  There's no way to know exactly how much, but it should be marginal.

As for the referral traffic, I mentioned how to measure that above.  But again with a 301 redirect, you will keep that traffic and if it is still relevant traffic, it should still add to your bottom line.