Removing pages from website

[RuudHeijnen]

Hello all,

I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland.

A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events.

I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events.

The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings.

What would be the wise thing to do?

Make a folder with archive or something?

Regards,

Ruud

[EGOL]

I have a site that gets 2000 to 3000 posts per year of temporary content - these are very short posts.  The content is great for a few months but then the value is lost.  Each year we delete 2000-3000 pages of this content.

Before we delete we look at analytics to see if any of these pages are pulling traffic.  If there are pages pulling traffic we 301 redirect those pages to relevant pages of evergreen content or create new pages for the redirect. After that all remaining URLs are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.

Some of these pages might have a few links.  The redirects conserve them.

To make this easy the posts are foldered by year /blog/2009/    /blog/2010/   /blog/2011/   etc.