Can to many 301 redirects damage my Ecommerce Site - SEO Issue

[PeteC12]

Hello All,

I have an eCommerce website doing online hire. We operate from a large number of locations (100 approx) and my 100 or so categories have individual locations pages against them

example - Carpet Cleaners (category)  www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners
        carpet cleaner hire Manchester    www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners/Manchester
        carpet cleaner hire london 
        carpet cleaner hire Liverpool

patio heater   (category)
        patio heater hire Manchester
        patio heater hire London
        patio heater hire Liverpool

And so on.....

I have unique content for some of these pages but given that my site had 40,000 odd urls, I do have a large amount of thin/duplicate content and it's financially not possible to get unique
content written for every single page for all my locations and categories.

Historically, I used to rank very well for these location pages although this year, things have dropped off and recently , I was hit with the Panda 4.0 update which i understand targets thin content.

Therefore what I am int he process of doing is reducing the number of locations I want to rank for and have pages for thus allowing me to achieve both a higher percentage of unique content over duplicate/thin content on the whole site and only concerntrate on a handful of locations which I can realistically get unique content written for.

My questions are as follows.

1. By reducing the number of locations, my website will currently 301 redirect these location page i have been dropping back to it's parent category.
   e.g carpet cleaner hire Liverpool page - Will redirect back to the parent Carpet cleaner hire Page.

Given that I have nearly 100 categories to do , this will mean site will generate thousands of 301 redirects when I reduce down to a handful of locations per category.

The alternative Is that I can 404 those pages ?...

What do yout think I should do ?..

Will it harm me by having so many 301's . It's essentially the same page with a location name in it redirecting back to the parent. Some of these do have unqiue content but most dont ?.

2. My other question is - On a some of these categories with location pages, I currently rank very well for locally although there is no real traffic for these location based keywords (using keyword planner). Shall I bin them or keep them?

3. Lastly , Once I have reduced the number of  location pages  , I will still have thin content until , I can get the unique content written for them. Should I remove these pages until that point of leave them as it is? It will take a few months
   to get all the site with unique content.

Once complete, I should be able to reduce my site down from 40,000 odd pages to say 5,000 pages

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

thanks
Pete

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi PeteC12,

(1) I wouldn't 404 those pages. I'd 301 or canonicalize them.  Canonicalize if you want to keep the location pages live for useability. If you're set on or well down the path to remove redundant location pages, then 301 redirect.

Even though there's no limit to the number of redirects you can create for a site, they can slow it down (because 301's trigger an extra HTTP request and cause latency). Given the size of your site, I'd recommend doing some analysis to figure out which pages actually have incoming links. If there's no evidence of incoming links, then I wouldn't bother 301ing them but rather monitor your analytics closely to put 301s in place only if page-not-found errors start showing up because of personal bookmarks.

For performance reasons, I'd also be careful to eliminate any interim redirects. By that I mean, for example, if Liverpool-Suburb (A) points to Liverpool (B) and Liverpool (B) points to parent-carpet-cleaner (C), skip the middle step and redirect Liverpool-Suburb (A) directly to parent-carpet-cleaner (C).

I'd also make sure my 404 page notes your redesign and explains that some pages have been removed from the site and point visitors to a user-friendly sitemap.

2. Should you keep location pages that rank well but show no evidence of traffic (using keyword planner)? Don't rely on Google Planner. If you have analytics in place, look at actual page traffic to see how many organic entrances you're earning to these pages. Base your decision on that.

3. Should you remove thin pages until you have time to flesh out the content a bit more? Well that problem may have been solved given it's been a few months since you asked the question. If not, and you're worried about penalties, noindex or 302 (temporarily redirect) rather than remove them.

Sorry you had to wait 3 months to get an opinion. So many questions get answered, sometimes yours can get buried. I apologize if I'm too late.