Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, You can simply leave them alone. Google will 'learn' that those URLs are all dead and remove them from the index. There's no need to robots.txt them out, or do 301s. Adding 2,500 301 redirects would have a significant impact on your page load time that isn't worth the risk. If the removed posts are showing up in Search Console, it means the crawlers are still finding them somehow. So you should do the following: The one exception to my 301 comment above is this: if you have good external links pointing to any of the posts you removed, you should redirects those to the next most relevant post Update your XML to exclude any of the removed posts Updated internal linking: if you have internal links that point to the removed posts, update those destination URLs Hope that helps!

Many sites end up pruning content when a site refresh is hit. If a post has no organic traffic, no traffic at all, didn't link to anything, didn't get linked to and has no social shares, there should be no reason to keep it around. If it has any of that in the last 12 months, I'd keep it up. This is one of those topics that you have to be careful with though. Don't go overboard and don't do it expecting a major rise in organic traffic. This is more of a housekeeping item. And as with most housekeeping items like fixing internal redirects, external redirects, etc, it can all combine to help with search performance. As Mike alluded to and I've done with clients in the past, I'd take the candidates for removal, pull a list of their titles and review to see if they can be updated. Use the topic again. It's a good way to supplement your content calendar.

Google has devalued sitewide links (and links from sidebars/footers) for a long time. Where you could get into trouble with this is if those "text ad" links don't include the requisite no-follow attribute. That would definitely get them flagged as manipulative and against ToS. Paul

Roman, Here are my thoughts: 1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask? As long as you stick to people you know would be a brand advocate for you, I don't see why not. 2. Which medium is generally most successful? We've generally only done email, but primarily because that's how we communicate with them on a normal basis anyway. 3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.) -  I know it's tempting and seems logical to make offers like that, but it violates Google's guidelines. Even if it's not for Google reviews, they might get wind of it and discount those reviews. Reviews are supposed to show a reflection of your business, not what you've offered in exchange for good reviews. 4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?  Those 3 are the top ones I'd stick to. 5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position? Definitely try to get some better ratings on CA to cancel out the bad.

You could, in fact, test whether or not removing the keyword from the page has an effect on it's rankings, but most likely that won't necessarily prove anything. In fact, you may even be more confused, as a page can rank well even if the page doesn't contain the keyword or keyword phrase. There may be a lot more factoring into these search engine rankings, such as links pointing to the page or the number of social media shares. It could also be related to how often you update certain pages on your site and if you update those pages or not. Another factor could be user engagement on the page, such as how long they spend on the page, bounce rate, or whether or not there are comments (if it's a blog post). If there's one page that you want to rank (because it happens to convert better for you), then I would focus on link building and social shares.

Roman, Awesome! Glad to hear you tackled the issue! Let us know if we can be of any further assistance! Trenton

If you have any doubts about this.  Decide if you want to put the value of your content out there exposed to the changing whims of the search engines. The upside is what?  An artsy appearance? The downside could be lower rankings, lower traffic, lower sales. Worth it?   Not for me.

for the original poster - what did you end up doing - and did it make a difference?? (and) similar question but different... If suddenly some 90% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 10%? in the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages. does this make a difference these days?? keep in mind that the 4,500 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place. will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 500 indexed pages? tia!!

Roman More than crawl issues, but in short yes, broken links, site loading speed, mobile optimization etc.  All the basics.  The technical seo audit by Moz is an great checklist to work through. Yes they will be if they are from bought links, or spam directories, but if they are earn't links then they would be natural and should not incur a penalty.  It is hard work getting one or two.  We use Moz and majestic and do a link analysis.  Have you done that? How many links do you actually have with the keyword anchor text you are targeting on the specific page? Your own blog, and own socials etc and the posts get re-published because you created such awesome content. Hope that assists.  Tragically there is nothing short of back breaking work ahead...