Deleting Tags Properly - Advice Needed

[naturalsociety]

I have over 18,000 tags. Needless to say, most of them are relatively useless to the user and generate no traffic, while cluttering the site. (I use Wordpress.)

My plan is to delete tags, but I want to do so safely as to not accumulate website errors. (Tags pages are noindexed.)

What process should I take here? Here was my basic plan (any help is appreciated).

1. Find irrelevant tags that are connected with hardly any posts.

2. Go into the post, and remove said tag.

3. Now, with a tag having a 'count' of 0, I go into Tags, and delete it.

Safe, right? But now it seems those tag pages just turned into 404s "Uh-oh...Page not found!"

Where do I go from here? Create 410's?

Thanks

• Mike

[GastonRiera]

Hi Mike,

There is no big deal on having tons of 404s when those pages are safely removed and don't carry any importance to users.
Even when those tag pages are noindexed, there is less risk there.

Google won't dimish your "SEO status" for having 404s that are correctly removed.
Here, John Mueller in a Webmasters Hangout said that 404 or 410 won't impact website rankings

Hope it helps.
Best luck,
Gaston