Does removing large portion of content hurt overall website organic visibility?

[Snaptech_Marketing]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering if there are any negative SEO effects of removing mass amounts of content specifically in the situation I am about to describe.

We have a website that is being converted into Wordpress, however, one particular section that contains a large portion of content (31 pages) have not been transferred over yet. We are very eager to launch the new Wordpress website for lead generation purposes and will gradually re-implement the content over time.

From Google Analytics, these pages have not generated a significant amount of organic entrances (~7 ) in the last year. Furthermore, these pages do not contain any backlinks.

I would like to know whether or not this would have an overal negative SEO impact on the website even if we 301/create a page for coming soon/310/404 these pages?

My gut feeling is no, but I would like to make sure I am not missing anything.

Thanks Moz community!

[max.favilli]

Maybe.

Are those page indexed? I assume they are. So they contribute to google view of your website and indirectly affect your SEO. And even if they are not indexed they are nevertheless crawled and probably contributing the same way.

If you have a website which talks about porcelain and football, and you remove a lot of pages about football, google will assume you are more a porcelain site than a football one and rightly so, and this will likely affect your SERP indexing for football related keywords.

[EGOL]

Only 31 pages?

Just do it.

[Snaptech_Marketing]

Hi Massimiliano,

You bring up a great point, thank you for that! This is exactly the type of big picture repercussions that I needed advice on.

Thanks!

[Snaptech_Marketing]

Yes, we're working at it! Thank you!