Deleting Pages in One Fell Swoop

[EEE3]

We're about to delete a bunch of unnecessary pages, largely responsible for our duplicate content woes. These are low traffic pages, and they were NEVER a good user experience.

I just want to check and make sure I'll be setting up the proper way to account for their absence:

1. Set up 301's for all of them so they point to related pages

2. Remove them from the Sitemap

3. Also remove any internal links that previously pointed at them.

Is there anything else I'm missing here? Or any additional moves I can make that I'm not thinking about?

Thanks!

[EEE3]

These pages are extremely light on the content, and they have barely any search traffic, if any.

A user reaches these pages by clicking on a call-to-action button (contact us, or get a quote, or make an offer). The resulting URL would pass through dynamic url parameters from the previous page, but the content on the page itself consists only of a form to fill out and one paragraph.

Though that one paragraph would have different text depending on which call-to-action button they clicked on, it's entirely the same in structure and code, with the exception of the parameter-laced URL.

We're still keeping the call-to-action buttons, but our developers are changing the form structure so there are not hundreds of these pages that are duplicate content. It's going to be a vast improvement for the user.

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I'll definitely use them in the future if we decide to re-purpose pages on our websites.

[DougRoberts]

Some thoughts...

Are any of these pages getting any search traffic?

I don't know how many pages you're talking about, but you might want to check if any of them have any inbound links and how many. It may be worth keeping the page and improving it rather than 301 redirecting it to a page that isn't getting the links.

Without knowing what's on these pages, I'd also suggest looking to see if there's any useful/quality content chunks that can be merged into the pages you'll be keeping. Are there any golden nuggets hiding in there that could help make the pages you're keeping even better?

Have you checked your analytics to see if any of the pages your removing are performing. You don't want to remove the one page that's answering the one question all your visitors want to know.  (Look at your bounce rate/exit rate and also your site search too). What part, if any, do these pages play in your conversion funnel.

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[EGOL]

That's what I would do.

I think that this will be helpful.

Good luck.