Over 30,000 pages but only 100 get traffic... can I kill the others?
-
I have a website with over 30,000 pages. But only around 100 are getting traffic from Google/being used by the company. How safe is it for me to kill the other pages?
Usually I'd do rel canonical or 301's to scrap as much link juice as I can from them, but at 30,000 we just don't have any place to 301 the pages that makes sense and rel canonical to irrelevant pages seems... wrong? So my hope was to just kill the pages, reuse their content when needed, but pretty much start fresh.
Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks,
-
Not only can you but you should.
Pruning non-performing pages that you don't intend to rework and get ranking is very useful. I would definitely 301 the pages though, even if you 301 them all to the homepage (not really recommended if there's any better option.) Get a full site crawl with Screaming Frog, your sitemap or some other tool, import to Excel, add a column for your new URLs (homepage or other) and then just concatenate them into a long list of 301s.
Or do some wildcard magic and make it simpler. Depends on the url structures for that, I suppose.
But yes, I would definitely redirect and get rid of the tens of thousands of non-useful pages. It should actually help your other 100 as well.
-
Hi Jacob,
The answer really just depends on why the pages exist in the first place. If they're not serving a legitimate purpose then absolutely delete them.
If they are legit pages that you'd like to rank (e.g. individual product pages on an ecommerce site) then maybe take a look at why they don't rank in the first place. Load speed? Site/nav structure? Internal linking? Blocked in robots.txt? Not in the sitemap? Maybe no unique content? There could be plenty of reasons.
The only thing to double-check before you delete them is whether or not there are any good backlinks pointing to any of those pages. If there are good ones, either contact the site and ask them to update the link, or 301 it to a relevant page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why rankings dropped from 2 page to 8th page and no penalization?
Dear Sirs, a client of mine for more than 7 years used to have his home page (www.egrecia.es) between 1st and 2nd page in the Google Serps and suddenly went down to 8 page. The keyword in question is "Viajes a Grecia". It has a good link profile as we have built links in good newspapers from Spain, and according to Moz it has a 99% on-page optimization for that keyword, why why why ??? What could I do to solve this? PD: It has more than 20 other keywords in 1st position, so why this one went so far down? Thank you in advance !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Help with 404 pages
Hello everyone, A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console). What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages? Please help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Why do I get India, Pakistan, Turkey traffic mostly?
Hi there, I've been wondering. Why do I get most of the traffic from these countries? My sites are english, I host in USA. I don't target a thing for those countries traffic, yet I get huge amounts of traffic from these countries. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
Why Is This Page Not Ranking?
Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030