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You Must Understand Redirect Chains and Old Content in SEO
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You Must Understand Redirect Chains and Old Content in SEO

Jan 4, 2023
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Various questions were submitted to the Search Engine Journal after a recent webinar. However, two of them were found most critical and similar according to SEO.

Redirect Chains

Take a Look at the Questions:

John Thomson Asked:

  • How do you deal with old websites that contain hundreds of URLs involving a few amount of traffic?
  • Do you initially perform the removal of bad content?
  • How much do you recommend removing at a time and about any regulation?
  • Do you recommend taking internal links into consideration?

Maria Jackson Asked:

  • Is it an excellent approach to redirect old content to new content with a redirect chain?
  • Or do I just need to remove that content?

You Must Understand the Old Content

However, there is a lot more to discuss but you should understand old content first. Keep in mind that your old content always has a date. So, the readers can simply recognize the old and outdated content. You can also take here a couple of strategies but it mostly depends on your specific keyword research approaches.

Most people consider the use of any piece of content. They also determine its relevance, bad advice, and out-of-date content. You just need to remove the content if found irrelevant or harmful material, or not relevant to redirect it. For instance, a blog post motivating about how to improve your Google+ following.

Meanwhile, You Can also Find a Few More Options

  • You must re-write your content or integrate it with other content to get more traffic for it.
  • Go ahead and 301 redirect the link to that content if you already have more updated or more relevant content.
  • You can also remove content if it is no longer according to your business or website.

The Use of 301 Redirects

However, there are a lot of SEO benefits to using an extraordinary super piece with a large number of external links. But you should use 301 to redirect the content link to sustain those precious links. You should find out why it is no longer a super popular piece. You can update it or keep it for later use but the key is to find out why the content isn’t popular. It is interesting that most of the old content no longer exists on the internet.

You Can Follow the Below Advice if you have Understood the Meaning of Old Content

  • Rewrite the content if it solves a user demand but has poor quality.
  • Remove the content if it isn’t useful or irrelevant.
  • Redirect the content link if there is newer or better content somewhere.
  • You can also keep it for historical purposes if you are still getting significant traffic.

We Will Now Discuss Redirects:

It is important that redirect chains have a lot of bad practices in SEO. There is a plethora of debate regarding whether or not they qualify for PageRank. These debates include how much PageRank they achieve, how much mildew, or how many Google will follow. However, around 98% of online users don’t consider these matters.

Meanwhile, you don’t need to worry about it because they are minimal and often don’t have much of an impact. Keep in mind that Google always follows redirects and could pass some value for them. But there isn’t any negative impact or penalty for redirect chains. It is important that redirect chains shouldn’t have more than 5 hops so Google could drop from following the redirects.

However, they will include a few milliseconds of load time to your page. Google will not send 100% of the PageRank value over to the destination. But it isn’t massive obviously considered an over-thinking SEO mechanism. Use the above information if you have decided to delete or redirect the content link. You must bring redirect chains to a minimum after updating redirects directly to the last destination.