404's after pruning old posts

[Dynata_panel_marketing]

Hey all,

So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing  thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired.

After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url.

My question is: are these 404's normal?

Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these?

Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file?

Are these 404's going to hurt my blog?

Thanks,

Roman

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You can simply leave them alone. Google will 'learn' that those URLs are all dead and remove them from the index. There's no need to robots.txt them out, or do 301s. Adding 2,500 301 redirects would have a significant impact on your page load time that isn't worth the risk.

If the removed posts are showing up in Search Console, it means the crawlers are still finding them somehow. So you should do the following:

• The one exception to my 301 comment above is this: if you have good external links pointing to any of the posts you removed, you should redirects those to the next most relevant post
• Update your XML to exclude any of the removed posts
• Updated internal linking: if you have internal links that point to the removed posts, update those destination URLs

Hope that helps!