Removing hundreds of old product pages - Best process

[cashchampion]

Hi guys,

I've got a site about discounts/specials etc. A few months ago we decided it might be useful to have shop specials in PDF documents "pulled" and put on the site individually so that people could find the specials easily. This resulted in over 2000 new pages being added to the site over a few weeks (there are lots of specials).
However, 2 things have happened:

1 - we have decided to go in another direction with the site and are no longer doing this
2 - the specials that were uploaded have now ended but the pages are still live

Google has indexed these pages already. What would be the best way to "deal" with these pages? Do I just delete them, do I 301 them to the home page? PS the site is build on wordpress.

Any ideas as I am at a complete loss.

Thanks,
Marc

[RyanKent]

I am not aware of any benefit to removing the pages slowly over time as opposed to all at once.

[cashchampion]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks, I'll go through now and start deleting them.
Will not deleting almost 2000 pages from the site, make Google a little nervous about the "structure" or "trustworthiness" of my site?
Should I do it a few each week, or just all at once?

[RyanKent]

In that case the general advise would be to delete the pages and allow them to 404.

The wordpress information is offered in case you happen to have a WP site. If your site is not built in WP, then a similar process would ideally be used.

[cashchampion]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks.
Yes there would be no other pages that would help the user.
So do I just go through wordpress and mass delete all of those posts?

[RyanKent]

When deleting a web page ask yourself the following question:

If I was a user who was looking for this web page and it was not available, is there another page on my site which is very closely related which is likely to satisfy the user's query?

For example, if you have a page on May 2012 Deals of the Month, then I would forward that page to the current "Deals of the Month" page.

If you do not have a closely related page, then I would suggest allowing the URL to go to your 404 page. You should have a solid 404 process in place. Specifically:

• your 404 page should be helpful. It should contain your site's navigation, a search option, a basic "I am sorry the page you are looking for cannot be found" message, etc.

• you should track 404 errors so you can understand the popularity of any URLs which generate a 404. If you see a single URL generating multiple 404 errors on a daily basis, then you can take that as a strong indicator of a need to create new content related to that subject.

I recommend Yoast Google Analytics for WP plugin: http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/. It helps track and resolve 404 errors on WP sites.