Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?

[RyanOD]

There are two things I would look closely at in such a situation...

Traffic: First, you want to know if these pages are generating any traffic. If they are, you should keep them. If they aren't (which it sounds like they aren't), move on to checking links...

Links: Before you scrap pages generating little inbound traffic, you should check to see if said pages have any inbound links. If they do, you would want to evaluate the quality of those links and determine if that is greater or lessor than the cost of keeping the pages and setting up redirects. If you determine these pages have valuable links, definitely 301 redirect them to a good substitute page.

When I speak of the cost associted with setting up the redirects I'm talking about the time taken to set up the redirects (likely your time or ITs time).

We use Open Site Explorer to help us audit inbound links to pages.

[StalkerB]

Redirecting them won't help the main domain rank for these brand terms, but it will capture the type in traffic and pass most of the link juice coming into these other sites.

Ultimately it shouldn't take your web development company long (unless you have hundreds) and indeed you could maybe even do it at the registrar easily (if not efficiently), so don't pay through the nose for it.

On the other hand, unless you rely on links from those other sites it won't harm your main site in any way by letting them die.

[PGRob]

Thanks for this reply, and for the others!

OK, so the fact that your site has broken URLs doesn't bring your site in general down in the search engine rankings?  Broken URLs aren't necessarily an indicator of a poor quality site that would result in some sort of penalty?

[StalkerB]

Are you linking out to these sites you have to get rid of?

In fact are they even sites or just other pages on your main site? I have maybe misunderstood

EDIT - I'll go ahead and assume I've just got the wrong end of the stick and it's pages on your site that you need to get rid of.

In that case if you can't redirect them can you change the links to point to different pages or even just remove them?

[RyanOD]

Sites put up and take down pages all the time. Broken links are of no consequence to the overall site quality.

This is a different discussion altogether, but broken URL situations actually offer an opportunity for a 404 page that offers users alternate content.

[Getz.pro]

As Ryan was stating; if those pages have inbound links, test those links for strength and if they are worth keeping, then 301.

Either way, I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway.

[Tom-Anthony]

If I'm reading this right though, it is only the URLs they've got to stop using, not the content. Therefore a 404 provide alternate content suggestions isn't necessary in this case; I agree that a 301 redirect is best solution - it passes the human traffic and the link juice to the correct location.

As to whether it is worth the cost, then of course it is the famous answer of "it depends". However, I'd imagine that the cost of redirects should be pretty minimal and if the old URLs drive just a couple of conversions (whatever that may be) then it should have been worthwhile, even ignoring the link juice.

[PGRob]

Yes, these are just pages on our main site.  They will be renamed, and we will be keeping the content on the site.

[PGRob]

This almost fully answers my question.  Those pages don't have inbound links from other sites.  We have over 10,000 pages on the site, so we can't have links to them all.  So, they aren't worth keeping for traffic or links.

But you say, "I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway."  So, my last remaining question is: Am I necessarily creating 404 errors by not redirecting?

Thanks, everyone!

[PGRob]

Thanks for that tool!  I was not familiar with it.

[StalkerB]

So can you just change the links to look at the new URL? Still best to redirect them though.

Curious about why you have to change them now though as I just assumed you were using a competitors trademark in a domain before

[PGRob]

The trademark issue is with the names of the subfolders, not the domain name.

[PGRob]

Great feedback!  I still just have 1 remaining question, though, which I've posted below Richard's comments.  Thanks!

[Getz.pro]

If those pages are indexed by Google and Google returns them in SERPs then yes, they will 404. That is why you need to test the page first and do a header redirect 301 to either the category page or the home page.

Hope that was the This Answered My Question : )