Move to an existing topic > Please change the 404 to a redirect to the new topic

There is something that has been bothering us for a longer time, but I never set myself to make a idea post about it, until now (there is an old topic, thinking this was a bug).

So when you merge topics, the old topics get deleted. This is not a problem for us, but a problem for Google. They will show a 404 in all the pages you can still find. Now this in itself will go away in time as Google doesn't like 404 pages, could be a few days, could be a few weeks.

However, in the meantime, you will be losing a lot of traffic to these undesirable journeys. Therefore I would like to see the platform create a redirect on the old url (the topic that you are merging to the other topic and will disappear afterwards). Then Google will also redirect all traffic that clicks on the old topic, to the new topic that you merged it too.

So, am I missing something or is this a good idea?

(I searched but didn't find any other idea related to this, only temp or ‘in the moment' fixes to remedy the indexing, this is not solving the problem though, just a workaround)

Cheers,