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Thanks Everett for your response, changes are in process and I will implement it this week. But it would be even better do remove the not redirected URLs in webmaster tools. right?

Technical question to the redirected URLs: Is there any difference if I leave the redirected webpages on the server or if I delete them?

1. Well, yes I expect that the other pages will benefit from it, because I basically can overtake the good content parts to the similiar pages. Moreover I can set more internal links to the pages which are actually ranking and generating more traffic. Of course, I could just take off all internal links from the dead pages, but I see no sense in there existence any more.

2. I know that you don't get a penalty for duplicate content. But I think it makes more sense to have one (improved) page for a topic/keyword than having 2 pages and one is basically dead from traffic perspective. From their whole structure the pages are just to simiiliar beside the "content" and even if this cannot force manual actions, it can lead to panda/hummingbird issues you will never recognize.

3. Yeah this action has nothing to do with the dead pages, you are right, I just wanted to mention it, because for me I inptreted it in the way, that google tests similiar pages in there performance and this can lead to longterm decreases. That was for me just another reason for putting similiar websites together and think more in "topical hubs". I talk about really similiar websites like for 3 phrase keywords when just the last word differs and the content is unique but basically tells the user the same like on the other page...

Yes I checked, these pages don't have external backlinks, generating only link juice through internally linking. As I will change the internal linking and the pages I take down will not get any more internal links this should'nt make any difference...

I just want to avoid any redirect, which is not necessary to really make sure that only pages who have a relevant similiar page get a redirect. makes sense, right?

Thanks for your opinions!

There are no manual actions against the pages, so shouldn't care about this! Like I said mostly they are generating no traffic at all (for these ones I cannnot see a good reason to redirect and not just delete them from the index and take them down) and some URL's are just competing against each other and the ranking fluctuations are quite high and therefore I want to put these competing pages together.

I guess I will redirect the pages which still have relevant similiar pages left, but don't redirect pages which basically had no traffic at all in 8 months and no real similiar page is existing.

Hello Guys,

I decided to take of about 20% of my existing landing pages offline (of about 50 from 250, which were launched of about 8 months ago).

Reasons are:

• These pages sent no organic traffic at all in this 8 months

• Often really similiar landing pages exist (just minor keyword targeting difference and I would call it "thin" content)

• Moreover I had some Panda Issues in Oct, basically I ranked with multiple landing pages for the same keyword in the top ten and in Oct many of these pages dropped out of the top 50.. I also realized that for some keywords the landing page dropped out of the top 50, another landing page climbed from 50 to top 10 in the same week, next week the new landing page dropped to 30, next week out of 50 and the old landing pages comming back to top 20 - but not to top ten...This all happened in October..Did anyone observe such things as well?

That are the reasons why I came to the conclustion to take these pages offline and integrating some of the good content on the other similiar pages to target broader with one page instead of two. And I hope to benefit from this with my left landing pages. I hope all agree?

Now to the real question:

Should I redirect all pages I take offline? Basically they send no traffic at all and non of them should have external links so I will not give away any link juice. Or should I just remove the URL's in the google webmaster tools and take them then offline? Like I said the sites are basically dead and personally I see no reason for these 50 redirects.

Cheers,

Heiko

I would not go for the second domain solution with a foundation. Regardless if you generate many links to this site, you will just give a tiny part of link juice to your mainsite through some links. Just imagine the example that another big page is linking to you, you will not automatically get all its link juice, right? Moreover you can get trouble if both domains are registered on the same name or use same IP adresses etc, as google identifies this as your "personal" link farm.

If you really think you will benefit THAT much from a second foundation domain page I would more think about how you get a good amount of the traffic from the foundation site to your mainpage and convert it there. But then I would try to rank only with the foundation domain.

Cheers,

Heiko

Hey,

I don't think so, why there should be a difference between internal linking within one subdomain and between different subdomains? It's not unnatural to use exact anchor texts as you are control of your own website..

If you are not really overdoing internal linking (completely unnatural) this should never hurt your rankings at all!

Greez

Hello Moz Community,

At first I wanted to say that I really like the Q&A section and that I read and learned a lot - and today it is time for my first own question

I checked our backlink-profile these days and I found in my opinion a few bad/spammy links, most of them are auto-generated by pickung up some (meta) information from our webpage. Now my question is if I should dasavow these links over webmasters or if these links shouldn't matter as I guess basically every webpage will be picked up from them. Especially from the perspective that our rankings dropped significantly last weeks, but I am not sure if this can be the real reason.

Examples are pages like:

https://www.askives.com/ -Auto-Generates for example meta descriptions with links

http://www.websitesalike.com/ -find similar websites

http://mashrom.ir/ -no idea about this, really crazy

Or we are at http://www.europages.com/, which makes sense for me and we get some referral traffic as well, but they auto-generated links from all their TLDs like .gr / .it / .cn etc. -just disavow all other TLDs than .com?

Another example would be links from OM services like:

seoprofiler.com

Moreover we have a lot of links from different HR portals (including really many outdated job postings). Can these links “hurt” as well?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Greez

Heiko