What to do with old content after 301 redirect

[LindsayE]

I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?

[Igor.Go]

I would leave it.
If there is a link to the old page somewhere, you'll get a 404 instead of 301 if you trash it. I'm talking about external links, I guess you've taken care of the internal ones.

If you delete the page any direct or referral traffic to that page will result in 404 instead of 301.

[ThompsonPaul]

As long as the correct 301-redirect is in place, there's no SEO benefit to keeping the original page, as it can never be reached. That's the whole point of a 301-redirect.

For content management purposes, you might find it useful to keep the old posts around in draft form in case you want to use them as a basis for writing a new post/faq, but there's no reason to keep them available otherwise.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Not really correct, unfortunately. As long as the 301 redirect has been written properly (it should be at the system level, not written into individual page code like a JavaScript redirect) then any request to the server for the page will be redirected before the old page can be reached. That's the express purpose of a 301-redirect.

So anyone clicking on an external link to the old URL (or a search crawler following it) will immediately be redirected to the new page as soon as they hit the server, whether the old page still exists or not.

[LindsayE]

Yes, that makes perfect sense! That's exactly what I was looking for.

I will make the old content a draft and utilize it some place else.

Thank you!