Retaining high value threads from automation deletions

Hello,

I do not have direct advice to answer your question - you're welcome to ignore this message :) Instead, I will treat this as an 'XY Problem' with the real question being "How do we improve SEO on our content and do we have to delete pages?".

I would say to answer your question in a roundabout way, don't delete content and stop using the automation.

If old pages aren't performing well for SEO, then the answer is "update the pages to be in line with SEO recommendations" or to accept that they are no longer trending with what people are searching for, but they're fine to remain for people looking for them.

If new pages aren't performing well for SEO, then the answer is "update the pages to be in line with SEO recommendations" and check if people are really searching for them.

There are many opportunities for SEO to be improved on Verint, here are a few of them:

 SEO - Internal linking relevancy improvements - Don't link from dates 

 SEO - Tell crawlers not to index pages like subgrouplist & mentions if they're 'empty' 

 SEO Improvement: Output canonical tags for ALL pages  

 Add width & height attributes for icons/images to help with SEO by reducing CLS 

 Optimising for SEO and 'Mobile First' UI - Is anyone else experiencing these issues?  

Therefore there are a number of factors that may also be affecting your content.

What I would also suggest that may be better if you want to not use up "SEO juice" by crawlers viewing pages, if you've decided that pages should perhaps still remain for being accessible to members or those that look within the platform, but you want the search engines to only crawl something that's "new" is that on old pages mark them with the "noindex, follow" tag , that way you're not signalling to your search engine that content has vanished, but you're allowing the crawler to look through content and move on without indexing the older content.

I 100% defer to Christopher G. Stanton on all SEO-related questions, but I have a possible option on how to handle the content:

Christopher G. Stanton said:

I would say to answer your question in a roundabout way, don't delete content and stop using the automation.

I'm not sure if this has the same negative SEO effect as deleting, but I have a few "Archive" groups set up so that Admins/Employees have access to old content should we need it, but it's not publicly accessible. I simply Move the content to the new group and know that redirects will still work (for those with access). Alternatively, you may keep these "archive" groups publicly accessible, but use one of the SEO Meta Data widgets on the group header (or possibly  Global "no index no follow"? ) to hide the whole group from the crawl. 

Alex Nassi said:

I'm not sure if this has the same negative SEO effect as deleting

Alex Nassi said:

but it's not publicly accessible

Unfortunately, as soon as the content is not publicly visible, it's invisible to search engines and it is in effect the same as it being deleted. It will have the same negative effect.

Setting 'noindex,nofollow' will have a similar effect, though Google, for example, will at least be able to crawl it, and then make a decision on it, rather than the page responding with a 404 which is a very hard dead end. You may want to have it as 'noindex,follow' so that the search engine can still scrape through content and look for new content, but it won't index the pages it journeys through on the way.