Page Retirement

[biggieshaws]

I have a site with 6000 indexed urls.  1,500 have traffic I feel is valuable and 4,500 with almost no traffic (perhaps less than 10 page views in a year).  These 4500 are inedxed but have 1 or less in bound links.

If I retire the pages, will I help or hurt my Domain Authority and separately my rankings that could produce traffic?

I'd appreciate any consideration.

Jeffrey Strassman

www.consultant360.com

[biggieshaws]

Thanks Man,

I have done some page retirement previously, when Penguin and Panda were haunting some sites.  I 301 the good links elsewhere and retired pages with otherwise spammy links.

I thought there might be a way to reclaim some links and retire pages that were not ranking or creating visits.

Thanks for your thoughts and recommendation.

Jeff

[EvolveCreative]

Hi Jeffrey,

I wouldn't remove unique content from a site - ever. If the keyword volume is 'too large for our content to be ranking' than there should be some long-tails available for you to go for. Look for long-tails by typing in the 'large keyword volume' keywords into Google and taking note of what appears in Google Suggest and the 'suggested searches.' There are several tools that can assist with this, but most require violating Google's scraping policy so I won't mention them here (PM me).

0-15 pageviews a year is 0-15 pageviews more than you had before. That could be an extra 20,000 visitors to your site in a given year. Doesn't sound like a waste to me at all.

[biggieshaws]

Thank David,

75% of the urls have unique content.  We are a medical journal publishing CLINICAL information for Primary Care Doctors.  Most of the URLs have unique content, talking to a wide group of doctors.  The keyword volume is either too large for our content to be ranking or too small for the search engine volume to help us much.

Since most of those URLs have one, two or no links, and 0 - 15 pageviews in a year, I though to retire them, but I might loose keyword rank or who knows.

I hope that helps. 25% of the urls of us blogging about reports we feel might be valuable. Its our URL but mostly stuff we find on the web that we somewhat aggregate.

JEff

[EvolveCreative]

Hi Jeffrey,

We can't answer your question without knowing more about the content on the 4500 pages. Is their unique, relevant content on each page or are they essentially duplicates of other pages on your site?