What is the best way to remove old pages (if at all)?

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi,

I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them.

My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content.

Thanks!

[A_Q]

Do all of the pages receive back links? It would be a laborious job and perhaps not worthwhile but you could look at which of the pages receive a substantial amount of links or links from high quality websites. Then just include the "Good" pages in your new site.

Like you say, I think you would benefit from losing some low value content that doesn't rank well and doesn't have many quality links pointing to it.

Whatever you decide it would be interesting to know how that effects your site. Perhaps even worthy of a YOUmoz post?!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Be very careful about dumping massive amounts of content.  It's not all about how many visits came from search.  It's also about the sum-total weight of the site.  If you've got 50,000 pages, that's 50,000 internal links to the home page.  Take away 30,000, that's a massive hit.  Even if each of those pages or the majority of those pages send a tiny little twinkling of link equity, just add them all up.

I've seen client sites take major hits removing that old "worthless" content against my advice.  And as an SEO, I then get to step in and say "here - try getting all those old pages moved over now."  Then watching as they rebound afterward. Slowly.  Painfully.

[BlinkWeb]

Thats a tough call. Would you redirect the old pages? If so where would you redirect them to? Redirecting to the home page is not a good idea. I would be cautious getting rid of content that has links to it without having somewhere to redirect thos pages.

It seems almost impossible to analyze all of the implications. Have you thought about removing older content in smaller batches? Maybe get rid of the least visited 5000 pages first to see how that impacts the site overall.

I am not sure I would be comfortable dumping that much content willy nilly without doing some testing.

Another option would be to make sure to redirect the old content to the category page so you don't just lose that link juice all together. I would highly recommend figuring out a redirect plan for that content. Losing the links is a bad idea!