Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site

[Silviu]

Hi all,

I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago.

I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones.

My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Ouch, Google will definitely notice. But if you already took a big hit on traffic then this probably would be a wise choice. What i would check before is how much traffic is going to the pages that you've deleted so you know upfront what kind of traffic you could lose again by removing these pages.

With luck though the pages that will remain in place will have more authority as they get better links from across the domain.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problem with doing this at all. I have also worked with a client who had a large number of pages and they came down from about 170,000 to just under 2,000 and the result was a good one. This was also to combat Panda.

However, when redirecting, take care not to just redirect every one of the 3m pages to the same places. If you can't find a good and relevant match for a 301, then just 404 it. it is much better to have a 404 than poor redirects. I would also review your 404 page to make sure it is user friendly and helps people navigate to something better.

Best of luck.

-Andy

[MarieHaynes]

I can't see this causing you problems.  I've commonly noindexed huge numbers of pages, mostly for sites with Panda issues, and in several cases we've seen great increases in traffic with a future Panda refresh.