Redirecting Blog Posts – Make it One to One

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Link Building

Many site owners have had the question “What do I do with my old blog posts?” Perhaps they are moving from one blogging platform to another, maybe they want to delete two different company blogs and focus on a new one—whatever the reason, they need to get rid of an older blog. The question then becomes what to do with the old content? Depending on how long your blog has been online you might have hundreds, if not thousands, of published posts that have been shared, linked to, quoted, and properly indexed by the search engines. That kind of SEO value is not something you want to lose, especially if you are moving to a completely new blog with no history or search engine trust. In my opinion, when redirecting blog posts a site owner’s best bet is to 301 redirect them on a one to one basis.

Here are 2 reasons redirecting blog posts should be done on an individual level whenever possible:

A better user experience.
Any old links to those old blog are still floating out there online somewhere even if you delete the blog. By redirecting blog posts on a one to one basis you do a much better job of preserving the integrity of the content in those posts and keeping the user experience intact. Think about it; a blog post contains a certain piece of information your target audience is looking for. You want to give them the most relevant information possible, so you should redirect them to a similar post on your new blog where the information might still be useful. You don’t want to make someone dig for the information they need by just redirecting all your old blog posts to the new blog homepage.

Avoid a link dump.
The search engines might take notice, and not in a good way, if a 1000+ links show up overnight on your new blog. While I’ve tested redirecting the links from an old blog to the homepage of a new blog with no ill effect, I’ve run into several other site owners that have had issues because of the link dump. By redirecting blog posts individually you don’t run the risk of flagging the search engines for unnatural link building. Plus, redirecting those old blogs to new can help those individual blog posts do better in the search engines, since they benefit from the old blog post’s links and trust factor.

Depending on how long you had your old blog, there might be thousands of great posts. It’s a shame to let such great content go to waste. If you can’t republish the old posts on your new blog (there is always the concern of duplicate content issues) then be sure to redirect each old blog post individually to the most relevant new post to preserve the user experience and give your new blog posts the SEO value of your old blog.