Deleting Tags without Penalty?

[FamiliesLoveTravel]

Hello - We have a site with over 1,000 tags. We added too many and would like a fresh start as they are creating a lot of duplicate pages on the site. What is the best way to go about deleting all of these tags without being penalized by Google? Is there a way to tell Google direclty to stop crawling them? We would prefer to not have that many pages just sit as 404 errors on the site. Thank you.

[katemorris]

If they are causing you to have duplicate content and there isn't much search traffic going to them, there should be no penalty for removing them. 404s don't ever cause penalties. You can tell Google to stop crawling them though, but it is a time intensive process that is probably not worth your time. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en

If you are deleting and then remaking the tag pages in a different URL structure, I would note which ones are getting organic search traffic and are most used by site visitors. Then when you remake them, put in a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

[Vanderlindemedia]

I've had a client who spammed on every blogpost like 15 tags or so that grew over time really large. It was best in this case to just remove 'm because they really added zero to the experience of the user.

[katemorris]

Oh yeah, remove away.