Consequences of shutting down a company blog

[boxador]

We’re an ecommerce company with a blog of 150+ posts. The blog brings in very low traffic and we were never that consistent in publishing great and frequent content. We now know our organic traffic comes from other pages that are doing great. So our question.. Should we:

1. Stop linking to the blog internally and just leave the it up as is. No harm here we guess, but these posts are not as relevant now and we feel their high bounce rate and low ranking is affecting our overall performance.
2. Take it down and 410 the pages. Will that many 410s eventually hurt us?
3. Take it down and 301 to home page of the company. Will permanently redirecting that many pages to our home page hurt us?

Appreciate any input.

[EGOL]

If the pages of your blog are not getting much traffic and out-of-date then they are probably not very helpful to your overall website.  Also, if they have skimpy content or low quality content they could have a negative impact.

If this was my site I would look at analytics for the blog, select the best traffic-pulling and best link-attracting posts, and redirect or significantly improve anything else that is not already high quality.

[Casey_Bryan]

I would firstly review whether the content can be touched up to make better use of it.

Failing that, I’d 301 redirect all to the homepage/most relevant page on the site. doing this many redirects will not hurt your site from my experience.

Best of luck!

Cheers,

Casey