Are Their Any SEO Dangers When Cleaning Up a Site

[ChristinaRadisic]

I'm doing some housekeeping on my website.

Removing old blogs that are out of date (2008) or things have moved on.  The blogs I'm removing are being 301'd to relevant newer blogs.

Can this type of clean up cause any problems that affect the optimisation of a site?

Looking forward to hearing your views.

Christina

[CleverPhD]

I think it depends on what pages you are removing.

If you have old blog posts that still get traffic and have links to them, you may want to reconsider keeping them or how you redirect them.  You should be able to look in your Analytics and see the amount of traffic they get, and also look in OSE to see what kinds of links they have pointing to them.

We are doing something similar on one of the sites I manage and I was able to look at these factors objectively vs subjectively and make some good decisions.  When we looked at old content (content prior to 2005) and looked at the factors above it was pretty interesting.  There was one page that accounted for 65% of all pageviews out of several hundred articles in that time period.  We obviously treated that page with greater care than the rest of the pages.

You will probably find a similar pattern, the 80/20 rule.  There will be about 20% of your pages that you really should keep or be very careful where you redirect and the rest you can just let 404 or 301 to a subdirectory higher.

When you look at it this way, you can account for any SEO "equity" that a page might have and then know what the impact would be.  Back to my example above, even if I deleted all of those old pages (including the one page that accounted for the majority of traffic to that group of pages) all of those pages combined only accounted for 2% of all my total pageviews.   So, even if I screwed something up when I moved thi group, I know the impact was minimal and I can sleep a little better at night.  

[EGOL]

When I do this type of clean up I always look at analytics to see how much traffic these pages are receiving.  Are they pulling traffic from search, are the receiving traffic from links, do people who enter my site through other pages consume these articles.

Only after that analysis will I delete those posts.  I often find that some of these pages are valuable and I write updates or completely rewrite them.

Once all of that is done then I delete and redirect.  I feel good about deleting these because they cut dead weight from the site.

[ChristinaRadisic]

I am checking the links and traffic to those pages before I decide to redirect them.

A couple of months ago I did take a page down because I felt it wasn't relevant to our website. Our traffic was cut in half, but the amount of leads our website generated stayed the same, so effectively I had a better conversion rate

Just another factor to consider - is it relevant to our users.

[ChristinaRadisic]

It does feel good cutting the dead weight and letting irrelevant articles go.

I am also listing what can now be updated and rewritten for a future post before the redirect is put in place