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In an ideal world, you would have unique content everywhere - category, subcategory, product detail page, etc. Of course, that requires a lot of effort to maintain. So I think the answer really depends on your goals and your stats. I would personally check my analytics to find patterns. First, I'd determine what level most organic traffic ends up landing on. Do they all land on your homepage? Do most of them end up on product detail pages because your long tail is better optimized? Are there higher level categories that seem to do the best? This will give you an idea of what is currently working for you as far as SEO, so you can begin to answer questions like, does the long form content in the footer help drive organic traffic at all for your particular website? Next, I would check analytics to find out: only for organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? I would assume that in most cases they need to hit the individual product detail page to add to cart, since they must select a size etc. - but depending on your site, maybe lots of people do a Quick View and add to cart from a modal, etc. Find out what your organic visitors are looking at to figure out which level - category, subcategory, sub-sub-category, product detail, etc. - the largest portion of organic visitors who actually bought something visited. Finally, I would check analytics to find out only for non-organic traffic, what content levels did people see before they bought a product? Perhaps you're running some successful marketing campaigns, and these folks land straight on a particular sweet spot that organic folks aren't finding, and because the marketed-to visitors see exactly the information they need, they're buying more. This will also be helpful in determining what levels of pages to optimize. Once you've determined what levels are converting best, set those as your priorities for unique content and driving traffic. Unfortunately, e-commerce is a tough market to be in as far as SEO and content. There are so many distributors out there that to really compete organically you need an edge. The good news is, if you're doing the work to differentiate yourself enough to earn better organic rankings and gain visitors, you should also reap the benefits of the visitors themselves having a better user experience and becoming more likely to actually convert.

Hi there, It is not a bad signal if you are in fact deleting low-value content that does not drive traffic or back links. Content is becoming more of a 'quality over quantity' game (thankfully). If you are making your site more efficient for Google to crawl and condensing SEO authority (link juice) and pointing more of that your more 'important' pages, you could actually see an uptick in business from organic search. I will note that you should look at your blog posts to see if there are opportunities to update them to make them more informative and/or more current. If any of the posts you are removing have inbound links or rankings, you will want to properly 301 redirect them. Take a look at these resources where sites removed old pages and maintained site performance or even saw an uptick. The content audit portion of your analysis is going to be crucial, you must be sure you are not deleting content that is driving traffic. How Deleting Bad Blog Post Content Can Increase Traffic - Why We Deleted 900 Blog Posts And What Happened Next Why Deleting Old Blog Posts Help My Website Grow Hope this helps!

Make sure they are linked up with hreflang tags which would help search engines determine which pages are their language equivalents. If you do a lot more promotion of the Dutch content, it will rank better than French pages (assuming equal competition). However, because there is a "these pages are the same but in 2 different languages" hreflang markup on the site, it should help you rank for the French pages as well.