Indexing irrelevant site pages?

Question

Google

Hello. We do a complete website redesign on the same domain. We will have all the products with new URLs, and the old corresponding ones will not be relevant. The essence of the question: what to do with old URLs? Remove from indexing or make it so that when you go to them there is a 404 error or redirects to the main page of the site?

Answer 1

what to do with old urls

Create a table of 301 redirects :

1. Unload all target URLs from the old site with any crawler
   
2. Match them with similar URLs on the new site
   
3. If there are no similar pages on the new site, you do not need to set up a redirect, you need to give a response code - 404/410.
   

If a:

1. Average IM (5000 - 30.000 products) - do manual page matching for categories and subcategories, and then tabulate. Product card pages can be simply uploaded and the programmer can be assigned to match.
   
2. Large IM (50,000+ products) - for an SEO specialist to unload all the pages of the old site, and after setting up redirects by the programmer, check the response codes of previously unloaded pages (the code should be 301 redirects from old URLs).
   

Nuances:

• If on the old and new sites all URLs were formed using different rules (and not just manually set without any logic or structuring), the programmer will easily set up a dynamic redirect.
  
• If the URLs were formed manually without a structure, then the programmer will need a redirect table (see above). To make it easier for a programmer to match old/new URLs for product cards, you can use the matching method by article.
  

Answer 2

if it is impossible to the corresponding new one - then 404

Answer 3

HTTP has a special response code: 410 Gone. Return it if you want to clean it up tightly.

The 410 Gone Error is an HTTP response status code indicating that the resource requested by the client has been permanently deleted.

But usually it is advised to redirect from the old one to the new one with the canonical meta tag.