Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?

[MFC]

We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop.

Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Google always takes a while to update.  Check a few of the 404 errors Google is reporting and see if they are still erroneous pages.  If so, you may have some pages to redirect.  Of course, if the page was simply removed and you don't have anything to redirect it to, then a 404 is what is supposed to be returned.  If everything looks fine, the it's just the delay of Google updating its info.  It should resolve itself when they get around to updating it.

[webmethod]

Hi,

It was a very bold move to drop such a significant number of pages from your site, especially if they were built up over time and attracted links. Even if the content wasn't completely original, that's not to say it didn't have some value. I think if I had made such a major change to a website and saw rankings drop, I would probably have reversed the change but then it's not clear whether that's an available option. Since I don't know the full reasoning behind the decision I'll reserve any further judgement and try to answer your question.

Returning 404s is the "right" thing to do as those pages don't exist any more, though putting 301s to very similar content is preferable to keep the benefit of any backlinks. I sense there weren't many links to worry about though as you're not very positive about the content which was deleted!

Google will hold onto pages which return 404s for some time before removing them from its index. This is to be expected as web pages can break/disappear unintentionally and so you have a grace period to "fix" any issues before losing your traffic.

The fact that Moz isn't showing any 404s shows that you aren't linking to the deleted pages because they are not being picked up by the crawl. They will drop out of WMT in a few weeks where you haven't inserted 301s to existing pages. You should also double check that they've been removed from the sitemap you submitted to Google.

Hope that helps,

George

@methodicalweb