I am having a friendly debate with Andy Crestodina on whether we should delete pages on our website that have no links, no traffic and don’t rank for anything. Our site is a smaller site, about 1,400 pages total and 50+ pages to prune. What's the harm in keeping them? Would deleting 50+ pages have any impact on rankings or anything else? Curious to hear your thoughts on this (taking into account the size of our site). Britney Muller, Dan Shure, Dana DiTomaso, Corey Northcutt, Kristina Halvorson, Eric Enge, George Zlatin, Taylor Cimala, Scott Taft, Ross Hudgens Anyone else care to weigh in? (this is our debating pose) #SEO #SEOQuestions #contentaudit
Oh wow, glad I stumbled across this thread. Great insights folks!
Hi! I'm not on LI as much as I should be, but I figured I'd weigh in late, anyhow. I tend to come at things from a user experience perspective, as I firmly believe if you give people what they need/want as quickly and easily as possible—online *and* offline—they will love your brand and be loyal to it. So, from that perspective, I'd ask specifically whether or not these extra pages are unnecessarily mucking up your onsite search results. Like, you know when you search for info on a site and you get a big ol' list of stupidly irrelevant pages? If they're showing up in that list, get rid of them. Also, there's a good chance at least some of those pages are either redundant, outdated, or trivial (especially if they've been abandoned)—do you really want someone stumbling across them? What would that say about your brand? So, yeah, I'd get rid of them for sure.
Formidable opponent Amanda. I say (first) consider ways to re-write and earn traffic if topics are worrhy. If they are truley dead, then kill them and save your internal link/crawl equity for the pages that work best.
Based on the previous comments, I'm going to sound like a skeptic or packrat. I don't think there is any measurable value in removing pages, even pages that have no rankings/links/traffic, unless you have a very big site (10k+ URLs) That's when "managing the crawl budget" makes sense.? But for most of us mere mortals (sites like ours with ~1000 pages) I don't think we'll see any difference in ranking or traffic by removing these pages.? I'm sure it "won't hurt" to delete but that's not a good enough reason to do anything IMO. I could make a long list of things that don't hurt. But why do them? I know that puts me at odds with a few of my marketing heroes, Corey, Justin, Ross, Taylor. Also, the one/only?Kristina Halvorson Forgive me guys! We'll probably go through the exercise, just as an experiment. But before we do, I'd love the $.02 of Dan Shure...
I’ve done it for two sites now, and seen positive results. One was 3,000 pages (30% of the site) and 1,300 pages (31% of the site). Here’s the main point I come to: these pages were created during the days of “thin content marketing”. They provide little to no value, and were usually news-based, meaning they are outdated. My criteria for pruning was: -No links, reported from 2 different tools. -Under 10 impressions/3 months -No kw rankings My view is that these are dead weight. If visitors want to find them on their own, fine, but I don’t want Google thinking these are representative of our site.
If they're doing no harm, don't delete. Redirect. I would suggest deleting if only you know specifically how they will useful to you in the future and/or how they will be understood by search algos of the future. Both are unknowable, so don't turn a negligible risk into a bigger one.
Agree with Corey’s rationale above!
Techical SEO Team Lead
3 周Amanda Gant I need you help is some technical points can you plz help me in it, I will share the details in you