Delete and 301 or just 301?

Hi all, I have a troubling case which needs to get advice from you all. Here it is.
My website needs to be restructured (let's take its example as abc. com), and I have a lot of urls which needs to 301/deleted. I will take one of them as below:

• My old url: abc. com/category-1/xyz (ranking top 1 for key 'xyz')
• My estimated new url: abc. com/category-2/xyz

So, what should I do? Should I:

• Delete the old url, then redirect it to the new url?
• or just redirect it to the new url (without deleting the old one)?

The reason I ask is because my website has a huge bulk of urls, categories, subcategories which are not logically classified, and now I need to change: url (categories, post, pages...) Besides, I want to clean up some unecessary posts. That is why I wonder should I delete and redirect (301) to its relevance or just 301 and leave the old ones alone.

P/s: If I choose delete and then 301, whether pagerank or backlink juice from the old one transfers to the new? How about just 301 without deletion?

If the backlinks to your old url are healthy, just 301 redirect without deleting the old url.

I guess you are using wordpress.

In that case xyz is post / page.

So technically you can not delete url. Deleting url means deleting posts/pages.

You are just changing category and due to your permalink structure url is changing.

You do not need to do anything except redirect old url to new url.

You do redirection either via htaccess or redirection plugin.

MisterXYZ said:

I guess you are using wordpress.

In that case xyz is post / page.

So technically you can not delete url. Deleting url means deleting posts/pages.

You are just changing category and due to your permalink structure url is changing.

You do not need to do anything except redirect old url to new url.

You do redirection either via htaccess or redirection plugin.

Click to expand...

I actually wondered this myself a while ago- thanks for this.