Hi! guys I have a site(page rank-2) with (around)50 post and a few (8)pages! Now , i want to remove around 40 post out of the 50... ! Will it affect my Page rank and my site ranking on google.... What is the best way to remove post .... keep it as draft / pending or just delete it! How to avoid 404 error? Thanks in advance!
Depends on whether those posts have any backlinks, or have been indexed, or if you get any traffic from searches for them. But in reality PR 2 is nothing to be precious about - if you need to make changes on your site, make the changes. You could put a 301 redirect from the old urls to home page or a new page if they have been indexed, and if they do get traffic.
if you urgent need for delete your pages...then go ahead. and for 301..you can give your sitemap for 301 redirect. then a visitor can easily go your new pages or old pages.
btw, why do you want to delete your posts?i suggest delete a post and replace it with another one maybe similar to the post you removed
How can i delete a post and replace it .. even if i replace it ... the link will not be the same as my permalink structure is http://site/category/title of the post I think the best will be what @magda and @anu08 has suggested... there are plugin which can do the work easily ,,,, Anyway Thanks all for the advice
Don't delete them. I suggest you just keep them. Deleting original content will decrease the backlinks of your site and cause ranking down.
Each of the previous blog posts will have a link back to the home page which although is not as good as external links it will provide some links back to your home page. I would suggest if you really have to delete old posts then 301 redirect them. When Google next crawls your site it will still keep any of the links back to your site (although the power of these links will be reduced). It depends on what platform you are using. If its wordpress its pretty easy to set up redirects but other templates have different methods for redirects.
If there is some problem with your posts, its better to edit those rather than delete them. Your traffic will get affected if the stories/news/posts on your site are yielding you some traffic as of now. The PR is not much pf an issue as it can always increase if till the time Google updates its PR well after you have edited the posts and they are of real good quality.