We're a SaaS company and originally had our guides at https://www.example.com/guides/<guide name>. We eventually moved from there to Freshdesk and have our guides at https://support.example.com. We re-created all of our existing content there.

However - we never created canonicals on our original guides or redirected our old guides to the new. And our old guides now rank REALLY well for a lot of long tail and even some great short tail stuff. We get over 50% of our traffic due to these old guides.

Unfortunately, they are old and not maintained, and we don't want to maintain guides in two places. So we have a few choices and I'm not sure which one will result in minimizing traffic losses. I'd love your thoughts.

• Permanent redirect from each old guide to the new guide.
  
• Canonical pointing at the new guide and a message at the top of the old guide saying "This guide is no longer updated. Please see the newest version at <link here>".
  
• Keep the old page but put a message at the top saying it's no longer updated and you'll be automatically redirected, and then after 5 seconds redirect to the new guide.
  

I'm open to other ideas too.

Thanks!

Chris

[edited by: not2easy at 3:00 pm (utc) on Jun 19, 2020]
[edit reason] example.com for readability [/edit]