Over 30,000 pages but only 100 get traffic... can I kill the others?

[jacob.young.cricut]

I have a website with over 30,000 pages. But only around 100 are getting traffic from Google/being used by the company. How safe is it for me to kill the other pages?

Usually I'd do rel canonical or 301's to scrap as much link juice as I can from them, but at 30,000 we just don't have any place to 301 the pages that makes sense and rel canonical to irrelevant pages seems... wrong? So my hope was to just kill the pages, reuse their content when needed, but pretty much start fresh.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Jacob,

The answer really just depends on why the pages exist in the first place. If they're not serving a legitimate purpose then absolutely delete them.

If they are legit pages that you'd like to rank (e.g. individual product pages on an ecommerce site) then maybe take a look at why they don't rank in the first place. Load speed? Site/nav structure? Internal linking? Blocked in robots.txt? Not in the sitemap? Maybe no unique content? There could be plenty of reasons.

The only thing to double-check before you delete them is whether or not there are any good backlinks pointing to any of those pages. If there are good ones, either contact the site and ask them to update the link, or 301 it to a relevant page.

[MattAntonino]

Not only can you but you should.

Pruning non-performing pages that you don't intend to rework and get ranking is very useful. I would definitely 301 the pages though, even if you 301 them all to the homepage (not really recommended if there's any better option.) Get a full site crawl with Screaming Frog, your sitemap or some other tool, import to Excel, add a column for your new URLs (homepage or other) and then just concatenate them into a long list of 301s.

Or do some wildcard magic and make it simpler. Depends on the url structures for that, I suppose.

But yes, I would definitely redirect and get rid of the tens of thousands of non-useful pages. It should actually help your other 100 as well.