Best way to remove worthless/thin content?

[gfreeman23]

I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc.

I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content.

• Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route?

• Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects?

• Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else?

• Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages?

Any help would be great!

[danatanseo]

I know that the number of 301-redirects can sometimes raise concerns about site speed. However, 1,000 is really not that many. Large e-commerce sites can have 10,000 301s, or even more. Depending on how the 301 files is handled even this large number can be handled in ways that have very little impact on site speed or page load times.

I think the number in your vase is nothing to worry about.

I do think that deleting and 301 redirects is the best way to go for anything that's remotely relevant. For those that aren't, create a custom 404 page and let them 404. Eventually they will drop out of the index. If they don't, you could still file a remove URL request in Google Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[MarieHaynes]

You may find that the yoast SEO plugin can help you.  There are options to noindex tags pages and attachment pages, etc.

[loopyal]

It depends how you do the 301 redirects.

I have 25,000  301s and they are not in .htaccess, otherwise it would be slow.

If nobody is linking to the ones you want to delete, and search engines send no traffic to them, just delete them and don't bother to redirect.

[DougRoberts]

As Alan said, if the pages don't have any inbound links then you're not going to lose any link equity by removing them. If the pages in question are not getting direct traffic or search traffic and don't have any links then I'd just delete them.

Otherwise a 301 redirect to the most relevant content is the best way to go.

Do a check for any internal links to these pages too. Your own links should be easy to fix. Remove them or point them at the better relevant content.

It might also be worth reviewing your 404 page. This can often be forgotten, but it can do a lot of the hard work guiding visitors to the content they're looking for.