Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?

[MarkWill]

I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way.

Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority.

Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines.

The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage So, not good.</topic></state>

We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective.

• Is this as simple as that - just removing these page?
• How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic>
• I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?

Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something.

Thoughts?

[K3v1n]

My gut reaction to your question of whether to get rid of links which google may see as a link farm - is "Delete, Delete, Delete...."

In terms of whether it's worth putting in the time to do anything with these pages such as to 301 - the question would be, what is on the pages other than links to low authority websites?

If they contain very little content other than the link, I can't see any potential negative coming from cleaning up your website like this.

In terms of potential benefits, if you're right in your belief that this is considered a link farm by Google, then yes I would expect good things to come from removing this. In reality though, you just never know, but if you have thousands of pages of garbage with links, then there surely can't be any harm done by removing these pages - in my humble opinion.

[MarkWill]

Thank you for the prompt response. These pages are there specifically to show lists of vendors (links to their web sites). We do identify the relevant topic from the URL and, from the vendor list page, link to relevant content elsewhere on our site, in a sidebar. A typical page like this would link to 5-10 articles elsewhere on our site.

But the primary content is the list of vendors.

Thanks again.

[EGOL]

we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage

First, I would look at analytics to see if these pages pull in any meaningful traffic.  If they do then you have learned something  -- that the keywords that these "types of pages" are optimized for might be valuable.  If they are bringing in good traffic, I might make massive improvements to them.  If you keep them or make new ones on the same URLs be sure that they are useful for the visitor.  If no traffic is coming in through these pages I would redirect them to a relevant page or simply to a related category page or my homepage.

How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs?

This depends on how much traffic enters the site through these pages and also the overall value of this website.  If no traffic enters you can simply delete them and allow them to 404.  If there is a little traffic or if other sites link to them then I would redirect.

What expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?

If your site has taken a panda hit then removing these pages could result in a significant rankings boost when (if) recovery occurs.  If the site has not taken a panda hit then removing the pages should make your site "lighter" and any authority and power that it has will be increased in these pages.

I would be optimistic - especially if this site has a lot of value on the pages that will remain.

[MarkWill]

Thank you - this is very helpful. I did some basic investigation around this.

The number of these vendor pages that have had at least one hit in the last year is 590. Across these pages I have had a total of 2249 hits. One of the pages (for some reason) accounts for 410 hits, but the vast majority (> 570 of these pages) have less than 20 hits for the entire year. Collectively, these pages have resulted in < 0.5% of our total page hits for the year.

So, they are meaningless in terms of volume of traffic but form a large percentage of our page count.

I am not really sure about the impact of a panda hit (or how to verify) but it does seem that the data above just points to deleting them. Since I think I can 301 redirect with a regular expression to the appropriate "topic page" that seems like the most appropriate approach at this stage.

By the way, I not sure how easy this is to answer, but how would I best assess "a significant rankings boost". Would that manifest itself in remaining pages being ranked better or is this as simple as looking at the domain authority after these pages are removed?

Thanks again.

[EGOL]

"a significant rankings boost"

Here is how I see it.....

If a page of mine moved from #5 to #4, I would call that a significant rankings boost.   If it moved from #50 to #40, I would call that trivial.   If I am on the first page and get any movement up I would call it awesome.

About domain authority...  I almost never look at it and can't tell you the DA of my websites.  It has just slightly more than "entertainment value" to me.   But, plenty of people worship those numbers.