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Hey there! I would still 301 redirect the pages. Even if the pages do not have any external links, Google may value them from the number of inner links pointing to them and the age of the pages. Google also sees a high 404 page ratio as an indication of an unhealthy website.

Thanks!

One thing that you may want to try is to sync up a Google Search Console profile to that subdomain and then ask Google to remove the URL's from it's listing to help speed up the process.

Google treats domains and subdomains differently. I wouldn't worry about redirecting the subdomain beta URL's to the main site as they were just indexed and have no value. Just focus on the no-indexing and you should be fine.

Also, I'd check and see if the dev site got indexed in Bing and do the same thing with Bing Webmaster Tools.

I hope that helps!

John

Yeah - you are fine. Whenver you get a chance to. We've redirected URL's for websites that we switched 3-6 months prior to us working with them and the equity was transferred over. I hope that helps!

Hi Philip,

I do. If you can provide more details on your site,  I can give you additional advice on how to structure it. If it's an ecommerce site, sometimes what you may want to do is optimize the product category pages and no-index the indivdiual product pages (especially if they cycle out).

I hope that helps!

John

Hey Neil - I think if you went this way you would be okay. You may see a short-term drop from the redirect but the majority of the equity would be transferred. User experience is always important in Google's mind so if you follow that for the new website structure and URL structure (along with the 301's) you should be okay. I hope that helps!

Hey Steven! They don't unfortunately. Here's an old thread that gives more detail as to why: https://moz.com/community/q/bit-ly-links-seo-benefit

I hope that helps!

Hey there! Thanks for the clarification. As I said before, I wouldn't do this. It's an outdated SEO practice which was popular in the mid 2000's.

Thanks!

John

Hi Michael,

Can you post the site URL so I can review further?

Thanks!

John