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I have a few old categories on my website, and I'd like to clean them up, but I'm a little uncertain how to handle two aspects of this.

One thing is that I have a category that I used to share photos (https://www.example.com/blog/snaps/). Each post is only a photo and a sentence. Is there any value to keeping such short content? Would it help to create a new single page/post and redirect all those links to that URL?

Secondly, what should I do about deleting a category that hasn't been used in years? Do I just redirect to a similar category or post/page?

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    What is your concern about leaving them?
    – Steve
    Feb 4, 2018 at 21:47
  • Only redirect if its useful for visitors, if not... abandon it... both SEO and UX will be dampened if you redirecting tags/categories to other off-topic tags/categories. 404 is the correct response for pages that no longer exist or even better 410 Gone, you could even improve the user experience further by saying sorry that page doesn't exist any more but maybe you will like these categories. Forget SEO, always redirect for your visitors, look after your visitors and they will look after your SEO, naturally.
    – Simon Hayter
    Feb 4, 2018 at 21:52
  • @Steve, I'm mainly just thinking the content is not valuable, and wouldn't be indexed anyway because it's just an image and a line of text.
    – Andrew
    Feb 4, 2018 at 22:06

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With the categories: You could clean them up and 301 redirect the old categories to the new or close related ones.

In regards to the posts: you can 301 redirect the ones that that are low-quality to higher quality or more relevant pages. Another alternative would be, to decide to rewrite or update them in a new post to improve the content and then 301 the old posts to the updated content.

For the snaps category I will recommend merge them all under the a category page and noindex, no follow the individual posts/images potentially to be classified as thin content. You can also create sub-categoryes like /snaps/2017/ or /snaps/cars/, etc.

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  • Thanks. Good advice. I want to avoid creating more categories, in the case of the snaps, but otherwise seems like the best plan.
    – Andrew
    Feb 5, 2018 at 3:43

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