Smaller Index

[Kuantokusta]

Hi guys,

We are a price comparison website with thousands of webpages. Most of them are product webpages with not so good quality content. Only price information and product image, no product details nor costumers reviews.

We are planing to focus on less product categories by adding reviews, details, better images etc... and I would like to know if I should maintain the other "not-so-good" products in other categories or if I should remove it from index to leverage domain average content quality.

Our index size is 200k pages and we are planning to focus on 10k pages max.

Thanks for your help.

[onwebtoday]

If those less significant pages arent entry pages for organic or referral traffic you can remove it. Else its not a good idea to remove those pages just to reduce the number of indexed pages.

If those pages are removed, make sure you add a custom 404 page to handle the 404 errors

[Everett]

Hello Pedro,

I think you are making a very wise decision. If you have already been throttled by Panda this could be what you need to bring the site out of it. If not, this could be what you need to save you from a future update. In fact, Matt Cutts recently answered a question about this sort of thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adocBLGQoYE

Note: The question is about "no results" pages but he discusses similar scenarios as well.

These sort of "stub pages" have been a thorn in Google's side for many years, and rest assured they will continue to find ways of keeping them out of the index - including punishing the good content on sites that use them.

As Infant Raj mentioned below, be sure the URLs return a 404 status code in the http header, which will ensure more prompt removal from the index than if they were to redirect or show a 200 status code. I'd ignore the first paragraph in his answer though.