Effects Of Removing 70% of Website Pages?

[EmptyRoom]

Hi guys,

What do you think would happen if I removed 70% of all pages on one of my websites? Those pages are filled with content of lower quality than the remaining 30%, and they don't receive any traffic (minor).

The site's making money, although a lot less than before Panda hit. I am afraid I'll lose all rankings if I remove such a large number of pages.

What do you think?

[zeus]

when moving pages on google tools, how would you do that when you have www1. mail.mydomain.com duplicates it seems it not possible

[EmptyRoom]

MrSavage, I'll wait for your report then. :)

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

[whatson]

Immediately after Panda 2, I removed 500 pages of my site, leaving only about 30. It hasn't helped yet, but it still showing 100 in their index, even after this time. I think it just takes a long time for all the pages to eventually drop, and until that time I don't think it is fair to comment on any results.

[johnhh]

Any changes will take a long time to filter through - think about it. Panda evaluating every web site and every web site page ? learning all the time, comparing with your competitors ? amazing resources are needed to do that so could take months to filter an individual site.

Every site could be a content farm to some degree , defining what is and what is not could take some time.

The only recoveries I have seen are those sites that have been white listed , and that took months to push out.

Personally , trying to push out changes between updates that increase emphasis of the page.

[ascensions]

Panda slowed down Google intensely... Not only is freshness often a week behind Google after Panda, but the index is riddled with holes from webmasters who've removed content.

[zeus]

whatson - yes its also getting on my nervs that if you remove pages from your site and it shows a 404, those pages stays in there index, im now waiting 4 month

[tedster]

if you remove pages from your site and it shows a 404, those pages stays in there index

Do you mean those URLs still show up in site: operator results, or get regular search traffic, or show as a result when you do a Google search on the URL itself?

Those things should not be. You might still see them in WebmasterTools somewhere, where the report data is often still very buggy, for whatever reasons Google has. Looks like a resources problem to me, but it's always been like this ;(

[g1smd]

I've been returning '410 Gone' for 50 000+ URLs on one site for months and months. The number of pages reported in a site: SERP has steadily decreased but there's still more than a thousand showing up. WMT reports 6000 URLs as returning "404" (why they report an incorrect HTTP code here I'll never know) and 90% of those have no information about the incoming internal links pointing to those pages (so, from past observations it is likely they'll soon be gone from the reports). However, several the reports show internal incoming link data for several hundred pages, but that data is several months old - so I guess those pages will also be gone from the reports just as soon as Google spiders those pages again. So, raw numbers aren't the be all and end all, trends over time are the key. The numbers have been falling and continue to fall; that's good enough for me. And no, I am not at all tempted to use the 'remove URL' tool to speed parts of the process up.

[edited by: g1smd at 11:38 pm (utc) on Aug 22, 2011]

[ken_b]

I dumped about 6,000 pages Mid-March leaving a 404. As of now, a site: search shows just 7 of those pages.

[Whitey]

I dumped about 6,000 pages Mid-March leaving a 404. As of now, a site: search shows just 7 of those pages

How many pages were left, and did you have any improvements to overall traffic ?

[ken_b]

How many pages were left, and did you have any improvements to overall traffic ?

Pages left = 2,650 +/-.

Visits continued to fall off, by a lot more than the dumped pages generated. If that was because of the page dump, Panda, or what, I'm not sure.

[Whitey]

I'm not sure.

Do you think those pages originally provide support through internal referal linking to the remaining pages, and might that have contributed to the balance of the traffic loss?

[johnnie]

Instead of removing the content, why don't you block it in robots.txt?

[map1]

I will not delete instead I'll do what tedster mention "fill it out to a good quality level " or ? make a complete rewriting on another subject-niche?

[zeus]

tedster - yes its when ex. I make a site: search I see those 404 still in the index, its mail. and www1. versions.

johnnie - well a robots.txt also takes forever before those pages are out of the index.

the weird thing is when you create a page it takes a few hours then its in the google index, but when you remove pages it takes month.

[ken_b]

Do you think those pages originally provide support through internal referal linking to the remaining pages, and might that have contributed to the balance of the traffic loss?

Sure, but these were bottom level legacy pages that had almost no external links. What they did provide was very specific anchor text for the pages one level up. If I had to guess at the most important loss from dumping these pages it would be the impact of the anchor text.

[Whitey]

@g1smd

Google has taken many months to take it all in, and I guess it will take another couple. Nearing the end of it, overall traffic and page views per visit are all up.

Can you provide some specifics on the timelines and quantities of pages involved, as a proportion of the total pages? I'm trying to get a handle on the time expectancy of recovery, based on removing/blocking pages and adding new content.

[Tech_person]

My site was hit by both pandas (half of the traffic gone). Since April I removed a lot of less important content that didn't have much visitors, even some pages with the PR 4. Well, nothing really happened. It's pretty steady after April, though I lost 6% of traffic after Google directory was removed where I had few good links. So I don't see any harm removing poor content and concentrating on more important pages. At least I feel better about my site now that its quality improved.

[digic]

My site was hit on June 17, down almost 90% in G US referrals. I admit, my site used to have shallow content. I had about 30 to 50 words on almost 8,000 pages. Removed all that I think were useless and retain and “noindex” those whom I think are serving well for my visitors. Planning to revise them and “index” one at a time. From 10,000+ pages now down to 2,000+. Ads are reduced from 4 Adsense blocks to 2. Almost 2 months of heavy works but still haven’t seen any improvement.

Its torture to see competitors site with less quality content (full of ads) and pages made as doorway to sell products on top of search result.

[AlexB77]

Hey guys,

One question: will the content of the page www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/ considered as duplicate and whether the index.html within the directories also be considered as duplicate www.mysite.com/file_directory/ and www.mysite.com/file_directory/index.html

I think I just discovered the reason why my site was pandalized, since there is no other problems with it otherwise.

Please your thoughts?

[Uber_SEO]

We've cut a huge amount of content - over a million pages. Initially we did it all using the robots.txt file. We saw traffic drop to those pages almost immediately, but found that Google didn't drop the URLs from the index, and in some cases, continued to rank those blocked URLs well. We've now changed all our blocking to use the noindex meta tag.

@Karma We use <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />, so we block from Google, but still allow Yahoo & Bing access to all our content.

We've also been surprised at how long it's taken Google to update its cache of our content - over 3 months in some cases. We have started playing with XML Sitemaps and Fetch as Googlebot to try and get the most important pages indexed quicker.

We're getting there, but it's a long & slow process, and very frustrating that nobody really knows if this is the right thing to do.

[g1smd]

Yes, index and / are duplicates but it is unlikely to be the cause of your demise.

You should redirect named index requests to the shorter URL, the one ending with slash. Use a 301 redirect.

[Whitey]

@g1smd - thought I'd persist with my earlier question [ above ] about a more specifics that would help members get a better handle on timelines etc.

It looks like it may have taken you a couple of reiteration / machine learning cycles [ ie 2-3 months ] on an aggressive timeline. Is my estimate about right?

[EmptyRoom]

Any updates on this? Anyone?

[PPC_Chris]

We removed all pages that could be considered low quality 6+ months ago and haven't regained anything since we were hit by Panda. Since our Panda demotion, we have been featured in the NYT, on AOL's homepage (twice), LifeHacker, WSJ, Huffington Post, etc. plus our brand searches are up 400%... but it hasn't made one bit of difference.

We have given up on organic traffic, which makes it very difficult (but not impossible) for us to get our company where it needs to be for long-term viability. Frustrating but thats reality.

[Lenny2]

Jesus... that is depressing Chris. And I thought there was hope out there!

[sahm]

I lost about 25% of my traffic due to Panda last February (50% loss in income).

I removed more than 50% of my web site by deleting an old message forum that no one used any more.

I blocked one section of my site from Google several months ago and that didn't help, that reduced my site to about 25% of its original size.

About a week and a half ago I decided to block several more sections (folders) of my site from Google, to leave only the sections that were still ranking well in Google (Panda didn't hit my whole site).

Well last week (the 8th, I think) my traffic went back up to pre-Panda levels. While this is very exciting, my earnings are still the same as they have been this whole past year because I am receiving very low-paying traffic. My former high paying keywords have been lost to the big brands.

Oh well...I AM excited to know that there is hope. Just have to figure out how to get people to click on the ads, LOL.

[Ummon]

I whacked about 70% of my pages after panda. What I did was look and see which pages were getting traffic after a month. Whacked the rest. I recovered somewhat, Went from losing 90% of my pre-panda traffic to losing about half. Its starting to return as I keep updating the site. Could just be a algo change. Who the hell knows

[EmptyRoom]

Any update on this, guys? Anyone noticed any results?