Site Redesign, Deleting & Redirecting Pages, Impact on Local Rank?

[JohnMarathonAir]

I just finished stage one of a site redesign, which was just an update of the theme / page builder. I have a lot of content, arguably some that is duplicate (not the same words, but similar ways of explaining the same concepts, like in blog posts). I would like to re-organize my site by deleting & redirecting pages that are thin / arguably duplicates. I think this could help my main pages rank better organically. But the question is -- would deleting & redirecting pages (which would mean reducing my overall page and content volume) lower my local rank? Does anyone have any experience with site redesigns that included deletions and redirects -- and did those affect local rank? I would greatly appreciate any advice if anyone has had experience with this exact issue. Thanks very much!

 

[MeganR]

I would also be interested to hear opinions on the above. My developer recently told me that a client's load time was lagging due to a tremendous amount of redirects compiled over the years. Has anyone else had issues with this?

 

[PaulSteinbrueck]

We have published more than 2,000 blog articles over the last 18 years and are in the process of reviewing them. In my opinion, it's worthwhile to

• Remove and redirect old posts that are out dated and not getting much traffic.
• Combining posts that are very similar (unpublish all but one and redirect the other URLs to it)
• Refresh posts that are older but still getting good traffic.

Google seems to be reducing their crawl bandwidth, so I would rather have 500 (or even fewer) really good articles for Google and human visitors than 2,000 articles of mixed quality