E Commerce site - removing discontinued items

[ElaineAllkids]

We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products.

We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty.

But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google?

We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this?

Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid.

I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task.

Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.

[Robnnl]

I would delete those pages. Please check this post http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website

If you have bad content or bad links pointing to those pages you can delete those pages. Many ecommerce CMS systems have an option to only publish live / in stock articles. So you should be able to get rid of those pages easily!

I hope this helps

[EGOL]

First be sure that you do not have an unnatural links penalty or a penguin problem.  If you have problems there fix them first.

Then get into webmaster tools.   Determine which of these discontinued items pages have valuable links.

Then get into your analytics.   Determine which of these discontinued items pages are still pulling traffic.

Any pages that has valuable links or is still pulling traffic could be valuable.   Decide if you sell an updated product or can sell a similar product.  If you can then use those pages for that new product.   If you don't have a replacement product then decide if there is another way to monetize those pages.  If yes, then do it.  If no, then, 301 redirect those pages to an appropriate destination.

Any page that is not pulling traffic and has no valuable links can be deleted and the URL redirected to a category page or your homepage.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

If you just want to get rid of the pages, I'd 301 redirect them all to their corresponding category page or just all to the homepage.  That way the search engines can find the redirects and make the adjustments and anyone who goes to the page (either from your site, a bookmark, or an external link) will not get an error.

If you have bad links to the pages, then just delete them, but note that you may end up with a bunch of errors and broken links on your site.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[ElaineAllkids]

We decided to go with a 410 for those deleted items, some of which were up to 5 years old!. They had all gone within a couple of days. The more recent out of stock or deleted products we're 301ing back to the main category page.

Thanks to all for their responses.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Sounds good.  Thanks for following up and letting us know.