How to handle blank, auto generated system pages/urls

[Jon.Kennett]

Hi Guys

Our backend system has been creating listing pages based on out of date and irrelevant data meaning we have hundreds of thousands of pages that are blank but currently indexable and active. They're almost impossible to access from the front end and have 0 traffic pointing at them but you can access these pages if you have the URL and i'm pretty sure due to the site architecture, google is crawling them regardless. For the most part, I think its likely best to 301 these pages to the most closely related page on the site but I'm concerned we're wasting crawl budget here. We don't want these pages to be crawled or found. Would a sound solution be to make them inactive, no-index and create a custom 404 in the event anyone (or the crawler) managed to get to them? Would this enormous increase in 404 pages cause us issues?

Many thanks

[Jon.Kennett]

Thanks for such a speedy reply! Its such a daunting task as there's literally thousands and thousands of pages so we want to be sure we're doing the right thing. I appreciate your help. Now i'll investigate blocking within the robots.txt and using google search console to remove the URLs

[irvingw]

First, do not 404 them, use a 410 error code instead as that denotes intended permanent deletion. In addition, I would also block the files/folder in robots.txt. Finally, I would use Google Search Console to remove these URLs. Good luck.