Mass 404 pages

[DPASeo]

Hi Guys,

If I were to have to take down the majority of my site, taking all content and links pointing to that content down. How would the search engines react? Would I get a penalty for the majority of the site all of the sudden missing? My only concern is the loss of traffic on the remanding pages.

Thanks!

[StreamlineMetrics]

You wouldn't necessarily get a "penalty" from the search engines but the pages will eventually disappear from the search results if they are returning 404 response codes, and thus you will lose traffic as a result. Your best bet would be to 301 redirect the inactive pages either to the homepage or to other relevant pages on your site.

[DPASeo]

The only problem is that the pages i'm trying to take down are all autogen/ thin content. I'd like to just get rid of them to avoid any potential penalty in the future. The pages themselves get less then 3% of the total sites traffic but amount to about 95% of the sites content.

[Dr-Pete]

There have been some reports of people running into trouble from mass-301s, and a mass-404 might look odd to Google, but I suspect any issues would be temporary. You're not going to be penalized for removing your own content, but there could be crawl consequences and you will definitely cut off the link-juice. So, whether or not it's a Capital-P "Penalty", you may lose ranking and traffic.

If this is preventative, and you don't currently have a problem, I'd suggest taking it in stages. 404 or META NOINDEX the thinnest content, layer by layer. If it has any relevance, 301 it to something appropriate. That way, you can also gauge the traffic loss from any links you're cutting. I'd hesitate to do this all at once, unless I knew I had a problem.

[AlanBleiweiss]

If there is any way to salvage any of the content, by combining it into fewer pages, that's ultimately the best course.  Because you can then 301 all the old versions to the lower number of new, consolidated versions, and have the best of all worlds.