Very Old Pages Creeping Up - Advice

[JH_OffLimits]

We are currently having very old pages dating back 5+ years ago appearing on moz all of a sudden, we don't necessarily get traffic from these links anymore and i doubt they still hold any weight.

Currently they take you to a 404 page, would there be any worth in redirecting these links?

[effectdigital]

If you're talking about Moz's crawler, it might mean that you still have links to those pages on your site even though you have removed the pages. Cleaning up links to 404s can help your 404 count decrease, both in Search Console and with Moz's crawler too

If you say that the pages have no SEO weight or traffic, redirecting them may be a waste of time. Just remove the links instead

[JH_OffLimits]

This stems from Link Explorer, pretty much all of the links are from external sites out of our hands.

[effectdigital]

Makes a lot of sense. You'd need to crawl all the backlinks using something like ScrapeBox Free Link Checker or Screaming Frog (with certain XPath extraction settings) to see which of these links are still live. For the live ones you'd want to run something like URL Profiler over them (with paid API keys for Moz, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs) over the links to see if any of them are worth anything (by bulk fetching metrics and aggregating them in your own spreadsheet, using your own weighted custom formula). Once that was done you could decide which ones to keep and redirect those. For the others you could handle them separately or just ignore them

[JH_OffLimits]

Thanks for the reply, this makes a lot of sense. Very much appreciated