What to Do with an Obsolete Article: Delete, Redirect or Rewrite?

Every site that has been publishing for years ends up with the same list: articles that no longer bring traffic, articles whose information has aged, and articles that cover the same topic twice. Deciding what to do with each one is the heart of content pruning: keep it, update it, merge it, redirect it or delete it.

The answer isn't the same for every article. Deleting an article with backlinks throws away the links other sites gave you. Doing nothing leaves outdated information in front of your readers. This guide gives you a decision tree and the concrete procedure for each option. If you haven't listed your articles yet, start with our guide on how to do a manual content audit.

Why Weak and Outdated Pages Weigh on the Whole Site

Publishing more pages does not automatically mean being found more often. Large numbers of weak or outdated pages can work against you for three reasons:

• Site-wide signals: Google's ranking systems work at the page level, but "site-wide signals and classifiers are also used" (Google). In its guidance on core updates, Google suggests assessing your whole site against its helpful content questions, not only the pages that lost traffic (Google Search Central).
• Outdated information erodes trust: Google calls trust the most important part of E-E-A-T. A reader who finds a wrong price, a discontinued tool or a rule that changed has little reason to trust your other pages. E-E-A-T is not a score, though: Google states that "E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor" (Google).
• Maintenance cost: every page you keep is a page you have to keep accurate. Fewer, better pages are easier to check and update.

About crawl budget: it is often cited as a reason to delete pages, but Google says its crawl budget guide is for large sites (roughly 1 million+ pages, or 10,000+ pages changing daily). For most blogs, it is not the reason to prune.

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1. Diagnose Before Deciding

The first mistake to avoid: deciding too quickly. Before choosing between deleting, redirecting or rewriting, you must answer 4 key questions for each article concerned.

2. The Decision Tree

Here's the logic to apply to each obsolete article identified in your audit. Work through the questions in order.

3. When and How to Delete

Deletion is the most radical decision. Google calls deleting content "a last resort, and only to be considered if you think the content can't be salvaged" (Google). Keep it for pages that have nothing left to offer readers or search engines.

Criteria for deletion:

• Almost no organic clicks over the last 12 months (Search Console keeps 16 months of data)
• No backlinks from real, relevant sites
• Out-of-scope topic or treated far better by another page on the site
• Factual content that is completely outdated and has no update value
• Duplicate or near-identical to another one of your articles

Clean deletion procedure:

1. Check inbound backlinks one last time (GSC + Ahrefs)
2. Check the internal links pointing to this page and fix them before deleting
3. If you prefer deindexing over physical deletion: add <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> and remove the page from your sitemap
4. If physically deleting: redirect the URL with a 301 to the closest page if one really covers the same need; otherwise let it return a 404 or 410, which Google recommends for permanently removed pages
5. Request re-indexing in GSC so Google picks up the change quickly

4. When and How to Redirect

The 301 redirect is the middle-ground solution: visitors and links that reach the old URL land on the new page, and Google uses a 301 "as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical" (Google), so the target replaces the old page in search results.

Criteria for redirecting:

• The article has quality backlinks AND the topic is no longer relevant to rewrite
• You're merging two articles on the same topic: the old one points to the new one
• You're renaming or restructuring your URLs during a migration

Three rules for redirects:

• Always redirect to the thematically closest page. Redirecting everything to the homepage doesn't give visitors what they were looking for. If no close equivalent exists, a 404 or 410 is the honest answer.
• Avoid redirect chains. If A redirects to B which redirects to C, point A directly to C. Google advises "redirecting to the final destination directly" and, when that is not possible, keeping chains short, "ideally no more than 3" (Google).
• Keep redirects as long as possible, at least one year. That is Google's own advice for URL changes, and it also suggests updating your own links to point to the new URL.

5. When and How to Rewrite

Rewriting takes the most effort. A page already indexed, even with little traffic, has an advantage over a new page: Google already knows it. In most cases, though, a precise update of the facts is enough; keep the full rewrite for pages whose structure or angle no longer answers the search.

Criteria for rewriting:

• The topic is still relevant and people still search for it (Google Trends, Search Console impressions)
• The page had traffic in the past and the topic is still searched
• Competitors rank better on this topic with more recent content
• The article has backlinks worth keeping

To understand the E-E-A-T signals you need to strengthen during rewrites, read our guide on how to improve your E-E-A-T score.

6. The Special Case: Merging Two Articles

Merging is a variant of rewriting, often the most effective in cases of keyword cannibalization. If you have "Top 10 SEO Tools 2023" and "Best SEO Software 2024," you have two articles competing against each other on the same search intent.

Merge process:

1. Identify the "winning" page (the one with the most backlinks or the best traffic history): this is the one that stays.
2. Integrate the best content from the "losing" page into the winning page.
3. Redirect the losing page's URL via 301 to the winning page.
4. Update all internal links that pointed to the old URL.
5. Submit the winning (enriched) page for re-indexing.

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The Decision Summary Table

Situation	Backlinks?	Topic relevant?	Decision
Completely dead article	No	No	Delete
Dead article, active topic	No	Yes	Rewrite
Article with backlinks, outdated topic	Yes	No	301 Redirect
Article with backlinks, active topic	Yes	Yes	Update as priority
Duplicate of another page	Variable	Yes	Merge + 301
Dated content still ranking	Yes	Yes	Update (keep)

7. What Results to Expect

Results vary a lot from one site to another, and they take time to show. Some published cases are encouraging: in Ahrefs' content pruning guide, Belkins reports going from about 3,000 to almost 10,000 monthly organic visits after pruning 400 low-quality pages, almost two-thirds of its site.

Keep realistic expectations: after significant improvements, Google says changes can take effect in a few days, but it can take several months for its systems to recognize them, sometimes until the next core update (Google).

Measure each change: note the date of every update, deletion or merge, and compare the clicks of the pages concerned three and six months later in Search Console.

Further Reading

• How to do a manual content audit: the complete method for inventorying and categorizing all your pages before deciding.
• What we found checking 23 of our articles and 7 from other sites: the kinds of errors outdated articles really contain.
• How to find outdated content on your website: the method to build your list before deciding.
• How to improve your E-E-A-T score: the signals to strengthen in your rewrites to meet Google's quality criteria.
• Ahrefs case study: Content Pruning: how deleting thousands of pages can boost SEO.