For dead content, is it better to delete-410 or redirect-301?

For dead content, is it better to delete-410 or redirect-301?

Q: Cleaning up 200 old posts. Redirect them all or just delete?

A: Short answer: it depends on relevance, and one test showed why. Longer answer: a lifestyle site pruned 200 weak posts in two groups. Group A (100 posts) got 301-redirected to closely related survivors. Group B (100 posts) with no relevant target got a clean 410 (gone). The mistake people make is redirecting everything to the homepage — they tried that on a few and saw Google treat them as soft-404s anyway. The honest split worked: relevant redirects passed link value (target pages gained ~12 percent traffic), and 410s cleared crawl waste. Total site clicks rose 28 percent in 3 months. Match the action to the relevance.

Anyone want me to go deeper on this? React 👍