E-commerce Question

[Bryan_Loconto]

I have a bunch of pages that I want to remove from one of our ecommerce sites www.macdecals.com

I understand that it's recommended to check the backlinks of each of these pages to determine if they have any incoming links before removing them, to see if I should even bother doing a 301 or not. (We have a good 404 page)

What about checking if the pages have any social media interaction?

After removing these pages is it recommended to update and resubmit our sitemap.xml file to Google Webmaster Tools?

I feel like once Google Webmaster tools finds the 404s and we have resubmited a sitemap, we can mark all the issues at hand as fixed.

Thought? Are we on the right track?

[customerparadigm.com]

Bryan -

The best practice is to 301 those pages to a relevant top-level category page, so that Google doesn't see that links into the site from social media or other pages is broken.

You can simply let them be a 404, but that doesn't send the solid signal to Google that you're managing the pages on your site well.

Yes, once the pages are removed, I'd recommend re-generating the XML-based sitemap and resubmitting it to Google, so they don't look for those pages.

But 301s for those removed pages will eliminate any future issues with people who bookmark a page or link to it from another site.

Just my $0.02...

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi Jeff,

From my understanding a 301 should only be done if the page we are linking to is related to the page that we are eliminating. We have about 100 items that we plan on removing, our rankings are very good and we don't want to lose what we've earned.

My concern is if we do 100, 301 redirects, it might be signal to google that something funky is going on..

[customerparadigm.com]

Bryan -

I just did a quick look at your site. You have a crazy amount of Google +1s.

Anyway, Google seems to have about 5,260 pages indexed, according to a quick search (see screenshot).

Google is most interested these days in creating an amazing user experience.  I wouldn't worry about 100 pages, as a 301 is going to be a better quality signal to Google than 100 sudden 404 errors showing up on the page.

If you're really worried, though, and want to reduce the number, you could do a backlink check on the pages you're about to remove and see if anyone has linked in to those pages directly.  301 those, and then perhaps don't worry about the others?

macdecals-pages-indexed-by-google.jpg

[Bryan_Loconto]

Thank you

we've already checked for backlinks none of the pages have any. However some have social media shares.

We are taking out two of the top level categories and items within them. Therefore, we would have to 301 them back to the home page because we don't have the top level anymore, which I believe can raise a flag.

[customerparadigm.com]

That makes sense... I didn't realize you were talking about top level categories; I thought it was more of a product page...

Post and let everyone know how it turns out...

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey Jeff!

Was just going through some old questions I asked and realized I never gave credit for your answer!

Thanks again bud, cheers!