When I relaunched Beer and Coding earlier this year, my plan was to go full on Tabula rasa. In support of this, I purged all of my existing content, dating way back to 2009. No backup, no archive, no nothing. Clean slate.

While greatly therapeutic, it also means I destroyed a decade's worth of content and all of its built-up equity with a single snap (editor's note: shoe-horned attempt at an Infinity Gauntlet reference, don't worry there will be more). I'll pause here for a moment to let all of the SEO evangelists weep softly...



Since my relaunch, I've noticed quite a few old, dead articles that are still receiving hits from backlinks, external links across the interwebs. By default, Blogger automatically redirects all 404's to the website's main URL, which seemed like a tidy way of handling things. Again, I'll pause for weeping...

The issue is that search engines are strange and fickle mistresses. No, wait, that's not quite right. That sounds like I might be insinuating that there is some magic and wonder to be found inside the blackbox algorithms. Search engines are exacting, biased tyrants. There, that's better. In any case, handling backlinks this way does not preserve any of their ranking or search engine value. The proper (editor's note: overlord-friendly) way to handle this is to use individual 301 redirects to reroute dead backlinks to a new content location. But the snap...

So, much like End Game, I'm now trying to reverse the past. Luckily, in this reality, someone has already invented a time machine, or more specifically, a Wayback Machine. And, after a little bobbing about in the timestream, I pinpointed the June 21st, 2012 archive as the most complete snapshot of my past content. Now to collect the stones.

Using the crawl reports in Google Search Console I identified what dead content is still receiving activity through backlinks. This information appears in the Search Console under Index > Coverage > Excluded. Typically, you would look for the "Not found (404)" excluded type. In my case, since Blogger was redirecting my 404's, my hits were under "Page with redirect".



My dead backlinks fall, more or less into four categories:

• Articles that would still be relevant or have historical value.
• Articles that have been superseded by new content.
• Articles that will be superseded by new content.
• Articles that no longer have value.