Downsizing the number of pages

Is that a good Idea for Optimization in google.

[seoram]

We have a website which has 25000 pages indexed in Google. The site is getting updated since 2001.
The management now would like to(remove all the irrelavent pages) Downsize the number of pages in the site to 100.
We are in a highly competitive industry, and our site is currently ranking for good keywords.

[tedster]

That's a very drastic drop in the total number of urls. Unless the urls you are dropping never interlinked with the ones you are keeping, you may have a major negative affect on the PR of your "good" pages. You may also be cutting off a lot of positive backlink influence.

Clean-up is one thing, but this sounds like a potentially life-threatening amputation to me. I would suggest a very close study of the current situation first.

[MThiessen]

25000

is this a typo? Condensing 25K pages to 100 sounds VERY extreme.

It has been my experience that "extreme" changes do not seem to have a positive impact, most often it is negative.

If all your ducks are in a row, and the 25K site has a lot of useless pages, then you are right to weed out the non-useful pages BUT... I would suggest doing it slowly, not all at once.

I have a hard time picturing a site with 24900 pages that can be axed...

[Leosghost]

I have a hard time picturing a site with 24900 pages that can be axed

most sites with 25000 pages that run adsense would have that number that could be axed and do us all a favour ..

myspace has millions that could go and no-one would shed a tear apart from the sad egos that made them ..

that said ..:)

25K to 100 on a commercial non adsense site that is doing OK ..what is cutting them going to do ..the 24900 are not doing any harm ..unless you think they are diluting PR ..and that isn't relevant if the site is working ..

a cut that big is likely to be fatal ..

[seoram]

Thanks for your reply's
I would like to ask another question like,
Would there be any negitive effect if I would remove navigation for the useless pages from the sitemap and other pages, and still have 25000 pages in the site.

[seoram]

I know that this sounds a foolish idea as it would be a waste of disk space. But what I would like to know is the would that no effect the natural rankings

[fibalogger]

It is explainable because I guess, the most backlinks are linking to your start page. If you reduce the number of pages, the domain becomes more power for each single sup-page then. If you extend the number of backlinks by keeping the number of pages it will have the same effect, but it needs a longer time ;o)

If your sup-pages are linked back by many deeplinks, removing of the corresponding sub-pages would not be as good.

I also clean up irrelevant pages immediately.