Anyone tried slashing pages to improve rankings?

[londrum]

I have quite a large site, and a proportion of it is database driven. So there are lots of paginated index pages, for example (most of them noindexed). Lots of business pages with unique content, but not a huge amount of text (maybe 400 words on each).

Ive never been hit by panda or anything like that, but after studying all my competitors I'm thinking of getting out the chainsaw and slashing entire sections off my site to cut the number of pages in half.

My competitors all seem to get more traffic with just a 1/10th of the pages. I'm guessing it must have something to do with the link juice. With ten times as many pages I need ten times more backlinks, or better backlinks, to spread around the same amount of link juice. Mine must be very dilute. I figure if I cut the number of pages down whatever remains will immediately benefit from more link juice.

Has anyone ever tried something as drastic this? Did you get any benefit out of it?

[lucy24]

410 should result in quicker cleanup

I can't speak to the index, but what I do know (from direct personal observation) is that a 410 response makes the Googlebot stop requesting pages a lot sooner. Other search engines don't seem to make a distinction. Sometimes Google is right ;)

[seoace]

Build some quick social or 2.0 links to some of your content. Outsource it. That has worked for me on a site with over 1 million pages.

[londrum]

Just thought I'd let people know what happened with my traffic when I removed all those pages.

It's been over three months now and I've seen no benefit whatsoever. all that happened was I lost the traffic that was going to those pages, and I gained nothing on the others. So overall my traffic went down,

I'm guessing the pages must have been okay after all -- not thin content at all. so I'm on the verge of adding them back on again

[tangor]

Add back the best of the bunch, say 1/10th of the pages and see what that does. If there's no improvement then why bother with the rest? What you really need is NEW, FRESH content.... and some back links, of course.

[ergophobe]

Thanks for reporting back. I haven't seen any great results from my pruning either.

[JS_Harris]

Outsource this task to a well respected source if you are unsure on any level, there are countless layers of data to look at and a whole lot of tools available that are too costly to justify for the average webmaster but are game changers, literally. It's not just a matter of hacking pages off if they have few visitors, your internal link structure as a whole comes into play and it's a good time to re-evaluate and perhaps update other aspects of the site at the same time.

I would qualify this particular task as "advanced" and not to be taken on if you don't fully understand pretty much everything related to being a webmaster from search ranking knowhow to actual code skills. Just being unbiased about the actual usefulness of your own content can sometimes send you in the wrong direction and you CAN do more harm than good in a heartbeat here, it's one of the few areas where I'd recommend paying someone else. Put it off until you can fully research related topics if paying someone qualified is not an option.

I've been a webmaster for a long, long time and still proceed with caution.