Can I redirect traffic from deleted articles

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Not with a built-in setting. There are two workable approaches, and one of them is simply not deleting.

What happens when you delete

The address stops resolving. Anybody arriving from a bookmark, an old email or a search result gets a page saying the article does not exist, with no route to what replaced it.

Links from your own articles can be fixed. Links in other people's inboxes cannot.

The better approach: do not delete

Replace the content instead. Keep the article, rewrite it to point at the current one, and leave a line saying what changed.

Everybody arriving at the old address lands somewhere useful, search engines follow the content rather than a broken address, and the history stays intact.

If it must go

Archiving takes an article out of the help centre while keeping it recoverable, which is nearly always what people mean when they say delete. Permanent deletion is for content that must not exist any more, not for tidiness.

Redirects at the front

Where you run your own website in front of the help centre, redirects can be handled there. That is infrastructure rather than a help centre setting, and it needs whoever manages that site.

Before deleting anything popular

Check its views. An article read a thousand times a month has a thousand people a month arriving at whatever you leave behind, and that number is the whole argument.

See also

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