(Entry was posted by Ajay M Verma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/02/2019).

Safe way to delete pages

I deleted a few pages on my site that were already indexed. None of them were getting any traffic, had any backlinks, and have any internal links pointing to them. Is it necessary to 301 them to a similar page or home page or just deleting them is enough? Thanks.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Kortni Remer: deleting them is fine. here is a great related article https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-audit/ I cleaned up a bunch of pages.. .redirected some and delete others and did see a good traffic boost
Michael Martinez: While I agree with Kortni Remer`s reply, if your site is very large and IF the deleted pages were included in navigational links on many other pages you may see some crawl errors for a few weeks. It shouldn`t matter if you don`t redirect the URLs.
John Albin: Also consider installing a plugin such as Broken Links Checker if on WP, after the content audit
Charles Lomotey: Disavow links slowly in Google search console
Ajay M Verma: Charles didn`t get u. Could u elaborate?
Charles Lomotey: google it Brother
Philip Rinaldi: Yes, you should always redirect links of deleted content. If it`s indexed and you get a click, you`ll get hurt with a high bounce rate. It also will fix any broken internal links found on other pages. Hope that helps!