301 or 404 Question for thin content Location Pages we want to remove

[PeteC12]

Hello All,

I have a Hire Website with many categories and individual location pages for each of the 70 depots we operate. However, being dynamic pages, we have thousands of thin content pages.

We have decided to only concentrate on our best performing locations and get rid of the rest as its physically impossible to write unique content for all our location pages for every categories.

Therefore my question is. Would it cause me problems by having to many 301's for the location pages I am going to re-direct ( i was only going to send these back to the parent category page) or should I just 404 all those location pages and at some point in the future when we are in a position to concentrate on these locations then redo them with new content ?  in terms of url numbers It would affect a few thousand 301's or 404's depending on people thoughts.

Also , does anyone know what percentage of thin content on a site should be acceptable ?.. I know , none is best in an ideal world but it would be easier if there we could get away with a little percentage.

We have been affected by Panda , so we are trying to tidy things up as best at possible,

Any advice greatly appreciated?

thanks

Peter

[PeteC12]

Many Travis,

A good detailed answer.

thanks for your help ,  I will look at doing this.

Pete

[Travis_Bailey]

The Matt Cutts says The Googles treat 404 and 410 codes nearly the same. (Getting to the 301 candidates in a bit.)

If the pages are going to be gone for a long time, if not permanently, I would go ahead and serve 410 codes for those pages. 'A few' 404 results are okay. Though serving up thousands of 404 results doesn't sound like it's going to do the site any favors.

If a page has some 'good links', 'enough traffic'/'enough conversions' and a relevant/related 'good page' you're going to keep - 301 redirect to the 'good page'.

If you serve up thousands of 301 results, you're likely wasting crawl budget. The major bots only have so much bandwidth they're going to use crawling the site. So rather than having the 'good pages' and new pages frequently and thoroughly crawled, you could be inhibiting discovery/indexation. Considering we're talking thousands of redirects, and the site in question probably isn't Zappos, it's probably best to 410 the chaff/thin pages. Google bot will still come back to see if the pages are really gone, but at least you won't be wasting everyone's (Your time and Google bot's time) time in the near future.

There isn't really any hard and fast percentage for what's thin and what isn't. But I can say if you're looking at a page, and it just feels 'thin', you can supplement with other types of content. You can add videos, images, real original reviews - just to name a few possibilities.

At the end of the day, if it's not worth your time to do a page justice, why should search engines - or people for that matter - bother with the site? If five out of 10 people in your target market wouldn't find the page useful, or easily fulfill a need, it's probably best not to make the page at all.