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Hi Kevin/Steve

Having a whole https sites tend to take longer to respond to the first byte and load i've found, which seem to be increasingly important in rankings.

I believe this can have an effect if the competition have faster more established sites and you are trying to get above them.

But another train of thought is that google may also trust you more if its a whole https site, so following Kevin's advice and having a https may be the most effective long term, unfortunately clients don't tend to like to wait.

Regards

Paul

Thanks for the responses, a 410 is a lot of work for probably little gain, so i think i'll run with just leaving the 404.

I have done an analytic's check on the url's in question and 10 had a tiny bit of traffic, so for these only i'll 301 to one relevant page.

Thanks again.

Hi

I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's.

Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page.

Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates.

I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this.

The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them.

Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.

Hi,

Should the 301 redirects appear in the sitemap.xml as this could get pretty big over the years?