Removal of date archive pages on the blog

[AndieF]

I'm currently building a site which currently has an archive of blog posts by month/year but from a design perspective would rather not have these on the new website.

Is the correct practice to 301 these to the main blog index page? Allow them to 404? Or actually to keep them after all.

Many thanks in advance

• Andrew

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Andrew,

The best practice would be to come up with search engine/user friendly new URLs each corresponding to the month/year blog posts and then redirect them via 301. Essentially, you will be implementing a one-to-one or page-to-page 301. Redirecting a whole bunch of old pages to the homepage via 301 is not recommended especially if these old pages have some organic or referral traffic coming in. This would have a negative impact from your user experience perspective as well as from an SEO standpoint. A blanket 301 approach (bunch of pages being redirected to a single page, in this case the homepage) is the last resort that you should think about.

Please do not even think of letting those old pages giving up an HTTP head status code 404. This is a big NO, NO.

If I were you, I would have come up with new pages (URLs) for each of those old pages and redirected those via 301 to the corresponding new ones.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi