Deleting 30,000 pages all at once - good idea or bad idea?
-
We have 30,000 pages that we want to get rid of. Each product within our database has it's own page. And these particular 30,000 products are not relevant anymore. They have very little content on them and are basically the same exact page but with a few title changes.
We no longer want them weighing down our database so we are going to delete them.
My question is - should we get rid of them in smaller batches like 2,000 pages at a time, or is it better to get rid of all them in one fell swoop? Which is least likely to raise a flag to Google? Anyone have any experience with this?
-
Hi
This happened to a co. I was working with recently who deleted thousands of pages without notifying the SEO team, this led to lots of work in WMT and lots of digging around to understand where we had lost links. If you've got a load of inbound links pointing at these pages and nothing has been done 301s etc then watch your DA fall, as happened to this company. Ouch. This is what happens when Tech don't "like" marketing.
-
To make it look organic for Google I would say it would depend on how large the site is. If you have a site that only has an additional 30,000 pages, then it would be really odd for half the site to be removed at once. To be safe, do a batch of say 10,000 and let it index before doing the next batch. If it seems like you've been penalized, do a smaller batch the next time.
Then again, if you are already being penalized and are desperate for a change, you are already falling out of control into the black whole of Google SERPs, then do them all at once. After all, your already doing poorly, any corrective action would be better than nothing.
Just my thoughts. There are prolly better experts here than me. lol
-
I would delete all of them at once. BAM!
-
Not a problem. Any advice on deleting all at once or deleting in bits and pieces?
-
In that case, I agree with EGOL. Just drop them all.
-
Sorry, I edited after you posted... I agree... If the 301 is more work then no need to do it.
Good luck.
-
This is more of a theoretical question, but if we're not getting traffic to these pages and there wasn't a way for people to get there, do we need to 301?
Adding 301's will increase the work we'll need to do from the dev standpoint and I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. Any ideas?
-
I would delete these pages as soon as possible, since you have determined that they are not of value. It is possible that all of these pages are dead weight on your site.
Chop chop.
-
Visitors can't actually get to these pages, so it wouldn't be an issue for them. We also have researched and have not had any traffic to any of these pages for over 2 years. So we're not worried about it from a user-facing standpoint.
We're planning on 404ing them because the likelihood of having any backlinks are as close to zero as possible. I'm just wondering if it's better to 404 them in batches or all at once.
-
I suppose the most important question is What will be replacing them?
You don't necessarily want 30k 404 pages appearing overnight like that and causing issues for visitors. Personally I'd say you should go through all the pages to determine what the most relevant alternative page is and then 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. That'll be a lot of work for 30,000 pages but it would probably be the best way to save from inadvertently losing traffic, backlinks and positive link equity.
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
-
Home Page and ranking
I have a problem and i have a question on that. Many important keywords and long tail keywords are ranking with the home page url.
Technical SEO | | mazzamz
How can i enrich the home page content without having a bad result and should i try to make the google spider send to more specific page?0 -
Issue with Cached pages
I have a client who has a three domains:
Technical SEO | | paulbaguley
budgetkits.co.uk
prosocceruk.co.uk
cheapfootballkits.co.uk Budget Kits is not active but Pro Soccer and Cheap Football Kits are. The issue is when you do site:budgetkits.co.uk on Google it brings back results. If you click on the link it goes to page saying website doesn't exist which is correct but if you click on cached it shows you a page from prosocceruk.co.uk or cheapfootballkits.co.uk. The cached pages are very recent by a couple of days ago to a week. The first result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/rainwear but the cached page is www.prosocceruk.co.uk/rainwear The third result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/kids-football-kits but the cached page is http://www.cheapfootballkits.co.uk The history of this issue is that budgetkits.co.uk was its own website 7 years ago and then it used to point at prosocceruk.co.uk after that but it no longer does for about two months. All files have been deleted from budgetkits.co.uk so it is just a domain. Any help with this would be very much appreciated as I have not seen this kind of issue before.0 -
Should We Index These Category Pages?
Currently we have marked category pages like http://www.yournextshoes.com/celebrities/kim-kardashian/ as follow/noindex as they essentially do not include any original content. On the other hand, for someone searching for Kim Kardashian shoes, it's a highly relevant page as we provide links to all the Kim Kardashian shoe sightings that we have covered. Should we index the category pages or leave them unindexed?
Technical SEO | | Jantaro0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
How do I 301 redirect a number of pages to one page
I want to redirect all pages in /folder_A /folder_B to /folder_A/index.php. Can I just write one or two lines of code to .htaccess to do that?
Technical SEO | | Heydarian0 -
Duplicate page error
SEO Moz gives me an duplicate page error as my homepage www.monteverdetours.com is the same as www.monteverdetours.com/index is this actually en error? And is google penalizing me for this?
Technical SEO | | Llanero0 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Pages not indexed by Google
We recently deleted all the nofollow values on our website. (2 weeks ago) The number of pages indexed by google is the same as before? Do you have explanations for this? website : www.probikeshop.fr
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0