Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Yes. Whatever the traffic source, visitors arriving at a deleted article's address can be sent somewhere useful. There are two routes, and they are not equivalent.
How do I redirect an article that no longer exists?
| Redirect rules API | Creates proper HTTP 301 redirects. This is what Zendesk points to for a permanent solution, and the only one that behaves correctly for search engines. |
| JavaScript in the theme | Needs administrator or Guide manager permissions with theme edit access, and someone comfortable with JavaScript. Zendesk warns it may affect Google rankings and is not suitable for long-term or large-scale use. |
The JavaScript route can also send untranslated articles to an available language, point every deleted article at one page, or branch on title or content type. Useful for a handful of URLs; the wrong tool for a migration.
The cheaper answer is not deleting
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, and nothing needs building.
Where it must go, archiving takes it out of the help centre while keeping it recoverable, which is nearly always what people mean by delete. It does not save the address though: an archived article leaves the same broken links as a deleted one, so the question above applies to both.
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.
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