How many pages to 301 Redirect

[panini]

Hi Mozzers,

My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop?

Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of?

Thanks!

[Vivamedia]

Hi Panini!

I dont think that there is a problem if you remove them all at once, you still have 10 000 pages left with great content. This is what Google want with the Penguin update, to clean up the web and make it better for all users.

Good luck!

[BenRWoodard]

I just went through this as I had a huge ecommerce site migration in January and then added a huge amount of 301's upfront with a regular dose of 301 updates as the 404's came in that I missed.

I didn't see any negative results from 301'ing the 500 pages and then the several hundred after that but that might be due to the fact that I redirected them to pages that were filled with the same content or associated with the same content (i.e. - category of a product instead of a list of the product variations page).

I've found my optimized pages were sticking a lot better and our new pages were being indexed quicker (90%-95% of sitemap urls are indexed).

A few things I was careful about when doing this was that I didn't just redirect to the home page.  If the page didin't exist anymore and there wasn't any associated content I would just let it die after making sure there weren't any inbound links or onsite links to that page.

I can imagine that if you redirect 1100 pages of your site to the homepage it is going to hurt some of your site architecture as Google sees it and could therefore reflect in how Google or and other SE sees your site.  Cleaning up your site is one thing but just redirecting to the homepage is another.

Try redirecting to a similar page, repurposing the old page (add a few links or a suggestion to the content "This event has ended and it was a huge success but check out our future events over here").

[KevinBudzynski]

I would also do them all at once but do a 404 custom error page w/search capability (if the pages are deemed not relevant/useful for your site)--like Bensaid.

[panini]

Thanks for the help guys. I have been 301'ing to a seperate domain rather than somewhere else on the same site. I'll speed up the removal of the old content, thanks Ben!