To Redirect or Leave as 404

I've been helping a travel blog writer increase their traffic for the last year.

Some brief history: Up until early 2016 they had peaked at about 80,000 page views, with 60,000 page views the month before that. By the end of that year and for all of 2017 they were averaging about 400 page views a month.

Now, here's my situation. I started working with this writer in January and by May their site was receiving over 300 visitors a month purely through organic search. In May, she hired someone on Fiverr who was selling 10k organic visitors without telling me. I noticed a few days after the traffic started and it was obviously all direct traffic with a 100% bounce rate. I managed to get her to pull the traffic.

In July we peaked at about 700 visitors just through Organic search. However, at this time she had me roll out a large amount of mostly empty pages. She had made a deal with a travel agency to create a page for them on her site. This page essentially acted as a funnel for other pages that contained blogs she'd directly ripped from the travel agency's site. Imagine clicking on a page that led to a list of countries, clicking on a country leads to a list of cities, and clicking on a city page leads to blog posts.

Since July it's been a downward slope when it comes to the site's organic search. We're back at March organic search numbers (~300/month).

I finally managed to convince her to get rid of the travel agency section, but here's my question: Should all of those pages (countries, cities, etc.) be removed and left as 404's or should they be 301 redirected? It's not like they were acquiring backlinks.

Thanks in advance for your help!

submitted by /u/Utopiuhh
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