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This is a great answer. From the sounds of it OP has: A scraper site gone wrong, creating malformed links to your site Some kind of shady negative SEO attack trying to create garbage URLs on your site A data pollution attack trying to mess up your analytics A hack-attack Any mixture of the above If a site has been hacked, sometimes it can take some proper dev work to pull it out at the roots. A hacked site is a liability to Google and Google don't like to rank hacked sites / content I would suggest checking whether the site has been hacked with some urgency and back everything Gaston has said

Are there any downsides?   My answer to that is "I can't think of any". On the other hand... Are there any upsides?  My answer to that is.... Google can be very slow to find - and then begin to use, canonical tag instructions.  On a website that gets a few hundred thousand visits per month, I have seen Google take several weeks to a few months to begin using the canonical tag instructions.  On a website that gets millions of visits per month I have seen Google take a few weeks to a month to follow canonical tag instructions.   In the reverse, it takes them even longer - sometimes several months - to forget canonical  instructions after the tags have been removed. If I was in your situation, I would take a "coming soon" approach with the website.  On the /success-stories/ page I would simply place an announcement in a box that "success stories for nonprofits are coming soon"... then on the /success-stories/nonprofits/ page, I would give an enthusiastic description about "what will be here"... and much of that might be useful for when the full page is finally up. As for the /year/ pages, I would not make them until you have viable content to populate them.  You can make them in a sandbox area, but just not upload or link to them until you have ready-for-visitors content. I find that sometimes a hard part of being a good webmaster is waiting until good content is ready.