Since I wrote the blog post Don’t fear 404s & avoid unhelpful redirects, I’ve followed my own advice. Happily, I’ve found more reasons why you shouldn’t redirect every page you unpublish.

Redirect strategy: Stickiness or helpfulness?

In my earlier blog post, I noted that a common strategy for marketing content is to always redirect deprecated pages—often to a landing page. Web metrics for the marketing content at your company may measure site engagement or “stickiness.” Keeping people on the site and engaging with content is a high priority for marketers.

On the other hand, the success of technical docs isn’t necessarily based on engagement. A customer might look at one page with a helpful answer, and then leave the site. That’s a successful site visit for tech docs, although in terms of web metrics it may count as a bounce.

For technical documentation, redirects must be used strategically and go to pages highly relevant to the content you remove. Google Search expects redirect target pages to be replacements for the deprecated page.

Irrelevant redirect targets cause confusion and frustration

In the original blog post, I described the frustration of being sent in circles by redirects to landing pages and other pages that didn’t answer my questions. In short, your customers expect links to be helpful and may not realize immediately they are clicking in circles.

Negative impacts on traffic and metrics

Redirects that aren’t relevant or chosen with a strategy in mind are likely to have negative impacts on traffic and skew metrics.

Redirects that aren’t strategic and carefully chosen can:

• Skew page performance metrics, such as pageviews or visits to an article, time on page, page referrals, and so on. 
• Drive unwanted traffic to a single page from many sources. I’ve seen cases of the number of redirects to a particular page growing unnoticed over time. 

Potential site issues from redirects

Lack of a redirect strategy for deprecated content can cause issues for your site, among them:

• Daisy-chained redirects, where retired Article A redirects to retired Article B that in turn redirects to Article C. Google Search Console will flag this as an error.
• Slower site loading from too many redirects, including redirects that are no longer needed.
• Maintenance for the redirect file(s) can become difficult.

When technical docs are deprecated, oftentimes many pages are deprecated at once. Redirecting all the pages of a deprecated doc set to one or a few pages multiplies the any issues from irrelevant redirects.

Do this instead

Instead of redirecting every page you retire, you have some options:

Decide which pages can just be removed without redirects. These are pages for which there is no highly relevant replacement content and that you no longer want customers to read. Keep this number small, as many 404s can also hurt your site’s search performance.

Create an archive for retired pages and use no index tags to keep them off the search results page. Add a note or banner to each doc letting customers know this content is archived, won’t be updated, and the technology may no longer be supported.

Publish a “What happened to X?” page and redirect retired content to it. Tech companies frequently deprecate products, brands, features, and so on – and leave few clues to help customers still searching on the deprecated brand or terminology. And customers – as well as other sites – do retain old brands, terminology, and the like for months, or even years, past the deprecation date.

In the “What happened to X?” article, you can explain the new brand, replacement product or feature, or alternative technology. You can also provide guidance for migrating to the new tech and other helpful information, if it’s needed. Here’s a good example from Microsoft: What happened to Batch AI?

Related resources

Most SEO guidance is written for marketing content, which has some important strategic differences from tech docs (read my entire blog site for details). Keep that in mind when you read these articles that are otherwise quite useful:

• SEMRush Blog: Too many redirects error
• Yoast Blog: What is a soft 404 and what to do about it?
• Google Developers: Soft 404 errors
• Yoast Blog: SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage

Categories: Content strategy, Data