Should I remove pages to concentrate link juice?
-
So our site is database powered and used to have up to 50K pages in google index 3 years ago. After re-design that number was brought down to about 12K currently. Legacy URLs that are now generating 404 have mostly been redirected to appropriate pages (some 13K 301 redirects currently).
Trafficked content accounts for about 2K URLs in the end so my question is should I in context of concentrating link juice to most valuable pages:
- remove non-important / least trafficked pages from site and just have them show 404
- no-index non-important / least trafficked pages from site but still have them visible
- 1 or 2 above plus remove from index via Webmaster Tools
- none of the above but rather something else?
Thanks for any insights/advice!
-
Hi StratosJets,
In general the more pages you have the more content you have. More content is usually a good thing. I think before anybody can give you a solid recommendation we would want to know why you are wanting to remove 10K+ pages from the index.
You see, Google looks at your website like a splash of paint on white canvas. Your website in a whole is going to have a large splash around your main pages, then some secondary splash clusters around other content types. Just because these secondary splashes aren't performing as well as the main splash doesn't necessarily mean you want to remove them, as they help paint a picture of the complete site.
If the purpose of removing pages that are driving "some" traffic is only to try and boost the other pages I would say don't do it. You maybe able to restructure your navigation so that these smaller traffic pages don't get as much link juice as some of your higher performing pages. I know this can be a bit challenging in some CMS suites, but removing pages that are bringing in traffic only to try and boost other pages is a very advanced SEO metric and should really only be tackled when you have gathered lots of data.
Imagine you remove 10k pages that on average get 2 hits per month each, are you reasonably sure that the remaining 2k pages will generate 20,000 more hits once those pages are gone? Or is it more likely you lose those 20,000 hits along with the traffic patterns those 20,000 hits would normally bring in?
That being said there are cases to be made for removing pages, specifically ones generated by CMS platforms.
When is it okay to remove pages: The general rule here is if the page has no value or negative value for your viewers / customers.
No value pages: These are pages that have been redone, or their content is also available on another page which is more in depth and/or more user friendly. (Thin Content type pages)
Negative value pages: These are often generated by CMS sites, eCommerce CMS's may have auto generated pages like "Manufacturer Info" or "Item Review" pages, which you aren't using. Blog sites may have "Monthly Archives" or "Similar Post" pages which can create duplicate content if not used correctly. These pages can confuse your users and search engines as to what your site is really about.
If you find your site has tons of no value pages and negative value pages I would say okay go for it, but be very careful look at your page metrics, be sure the pages you are removing are in fact useless and provide no value for your viewers / customers.
If you decide to go the route of removal, the best way from my experience is to 301 pages which have correlating content on another page, and only 404 any page that have absolutely no value and page alternatives. If you 404 a page make sure you remove it from your sitemap and try submit it for removal. Lots of 404's isn't a good thing either...
I hope this helps,
Don
-
Hi,
IMO, don't remove/de-index/404 the pages which are not your traffic drivers today, they might bring some traffic for you tomorrow. I assume, these pages aren't hurting (going-to-hurt) you i.e they are not duplicate content candidates or something.
Of course you can promote whatever pages you want, like you want to promote those 2k traffic drivers in your case.
P.S Taking down a page and showing 404 is not a good practice in general. If you're permanently closing a page and don't want to 301/302 redirect it, then handle it using 410 instead of 404 here. You can check more about http status codes here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Link externally from destination pages
Hello, From my destinations pages, is it beneficial to have a link going externally to the hotels my clients are staying in ? In other words is it beneficial to my website or will it hurt me to link external from all my destinations pages to all the hotels my clients are staying in ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
When to consolidate and when to bid Link Juice farewell?
Greetings all! I've got a couple of questions about when and if it's alright to let accumulated Link Juice (LJ) slip into the depths of oblivion. I arrived 4 years late to the ticketing website that I work for (www.charged.fm), and found the website in a certain state of disarray. For the past 6 months I've been trying to wrap my head around SEO and our 750k+ page site, and lately we've been making good progress cleaning things up and redesigning. I'm at a loss, though, as to what to do with some pages. Example: The blog director has been using hash tags for years now that created new pages for each different #, which created a lot of instances of 2 [bytag] pages for 2 different hash tags that had the same article on them. http://www.charged.fm/blog/bytag/31631/steve-masiello-usf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o
http://www.charged.fm/blog/bytag/31632/steve-masiello-south-florida We've added 'noindex, follow' to this directory (which is the correct solutions, riiight??), but now I'm wondering if some of these pages should be 301'd to more relevant sections of the site, or back to the blog homepage. I know this could be bad for UI, but I don't believe that they're frequently used pages and don't want to let these PA 15 pages go to waste. Any thoughts on this? Example 2: A similar situation is that they used 302s to redirect to search results pages instead of using category pages. So now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of search results pages that have a PA of 15 or more. http://www.charged.fm/search/results/music-tickets We're working on restructuring the site and removing the 302s, but I'm wondering if it's necessary to 301 all of the search results pages to the new category pages like so: http://www.charged.fm/search/results/music-tickets >>> http://www.charged.fm/concert-tickets This would require the programmer to create new search/results pages in order to 301 the old ranking ones, correct? Should I put this in queue for him or just leave the search results pages with 'noindex, follow' and let the PA 15 go to waste? There are many other instances like this like a Login page with PA 20, and I just can't decide if everything should be redirected or what to leave as dust in the wind. Because all we are is dust in the wind ; ) Thanks for any help, Luke0 -
Dealing with Penguin: Changing URL instead of removing links
I have some links pointing to categories from article directories, web directories, and a few blogs. We are talking about 20-30 links in total. They are less than 5% of the links to my site (counting unique domains). I either haven't been able to make contact with webmasters, or they are asking money to remove the links. If I simply rename the URL (for example changing mysite.com/t-shirt.html to mysite.com/tshirts.html), will that resolve any penguin issues? The link will forward to the homepage since that page no longer exists. I really want to avoid using the disavow tool if possible. I appreciate the feedback. If you have actually done this, please share your experience.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Site wide links removal
A website of mine has about 4,000 backlinks of which 2,500 of them are coming from one website to the homepage and about 6 internal pages. These have been built up over about 5 years, mainly via article posts. The site was recently hit via penguin 2.0 but has only had natural links built so i'm wondering if the sitewide links are in fact the issue? The website linking to mine is an authority source within its niche but the concern is the amount of backlinks coming from this one site and if it may now be seen as having a negative impact. When ive reviewed the links from this one site via a backlink removal tool about 80% seem fine and suggestions are to remove about 20% of the backlinks. Would you keep all the sitewide backlinks or remove them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Have you come across a similar situation and how did it affect ranking/traffic?0 -
Is link juice passed through a 301 and a canonical tag?
Hi all, I am led to believe that link juice does not pass through more than one 301 redirect, however what about a 301 and then a canonical meta tag? Here is an example: subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> 301 -> **www.**site.com/uk/page/ www.site.com**/uk/**page/ -> canonical -> www.site.com/page/ Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris0