If you have ever taken on a website redesign for a company that has been around for at least five years, you will have encountered a troublesome collection of “ownerless historical assets”: three or four hundred press releases published five years ago, product pages for models long out of production, and even explanations of industry policies that have long since ended, all sitting in the old site's CMS. You take an exported spreadsheet to the client's marketing department and ask, “Do we still need these hundreds of old pages on the new website? Are the specifications and promises in them still accurate?”
The head of marketing will often shrug: “The colleague who used to handle this left ages ago, and nobody in R&D now dares to sign off on whether those old model specifications are correct. But if we delete everything outright, what if one of those pages still ranks on Baidu or Google? Wouldn't we just be throwing traffic away?”
The old content then gets stuck in limbo: nobody dares to review it or delete it, holding up the entire new website's launch. When JVDS handles a migration from an old site, we never leave the client staring helplessly at hundreds of titles. We first filter them using data, then make quick decisions according to 4 clearly defined destinations:
Step One: Use Search Console and analytics tools to identify “pages that real people actually visit”
Do not waste your internal engineers' valuable review time on dead pages with no traffic. First, export a list of URLs that received organic search clicks, had inbound external links, or recorded real page views in the past 12 months from Google Search Console, Baidu Search Resource Platform, and the website's analytics system.
You may be surprised to find that, of those 500 unclaimed pages on the old site, often at least 85% received 0 clicks over the entire past year! Pages still receiving organic search traffic are usually concentrated in the top 20–40.
Step Two: Sort the identified pages into 4 treatment categories
| Old page category | Specific characteristics | Recommended public destination and SEO treatment |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Old model pages with search traffic, where the product has been discontinued or upgraded | Existing customers or procurement staff often search for the old part number, but the company has now replaced it with a next-generation model | Retain or merge the page, and label it “Historical archive / Discontinued product replacement notice”: Add a prominent notice at the top: *“This model was discontinued in 2025. Its upgraded replacement is [XXX New Model (click to view)]”*, or apply a 301 redirect directly to a new product page with an old-versus-new comparison table to carry over the old model's traffic seamlessly |
| 2. Old articles with search traffic but outdated technical statements or prices | Ranks well, but the prices, years of regulations, or old screenshots in the article no longer reflect the current situation | Add to a mandatory review shortlist (usually just 10–30 articles): With the volume reduced to a few dozen articles, assign them directly to the relevant product managers for half a day of work updating the text and removing outdated pricing promises. Preserve the original URL paths to retain their rankings after the redesign |
| 3. Pages with zero traffic and zero backlinks concerning outdated partnerships, departed executives, or past events | Old exhibition announcements, expired promotions, or statements about former agency partnerships that nobody has visited for at least 3 years | Take them offline and return 410 Gone (or 404): Since they have no search authority or external links, and leaving them online could mislead customers or create compliance risks, simply remove them from the new CMS and retain an archived backup in the backend |
| 4. Historical reference materials (such as old driver downloads or manuals for legacy equipment) | No value for converting new customers, but existing after-sales customers occasionally need to find them by scanning a QR code | Move them into a dedicated “Historical Product Documentation Archive” and add <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> to the page, allowing existing customers to find them through on-site search without taking up the new website's core indexing quota |
Separate pages “with traffic” from those with “zero traffic” first, and a review task involving hundreds of pages that initially seemed impossible can often be wrapped up cleanly within two days.
