Deleting hundreds of pages at once... bad idea?

[TomSnow]

I have over 700 pages to delete.

Some are keyword cannibals.

Others are empty attachment pages caused by a wordpress/yoast bug.

Others get close to 0 traffic and never will do better.

I'm going to delete and 410 most of them. But I'm wondering, can there be any negative effects to suddenly deleting 700 pages in one fell swoop?

PS I already made sure to change any interlinks to the soon-to-be deleted pages. And I'm 301ing any pages that actually get traffic/links.

Thanks for any advice you can provide!

[dennisjensen]

Sounds good to me. If it makes you feel better, maybe do a hundred at a time once a week, just to observe.

[tangor]

If the pages are as described, I'd do them all at one time and move on.

[engine]

I always believe in test, test, test.
Nobody can know exactly how Google sees the site in question, except Google.
The bug is less of an issue.

Yes, it could affect the site, so i'd probably remove the others more slowly, and as suggested, monitor.

Test, test, test.

[aristotle]

Even if you delete all of these pages at one time, it could take googlebot weeks or even months to find all of the 410s. You could manually remove them, but I wouldn't do that myself, since in my opinion a gradual approach is better.

[lucy24]

700 out of how many? 1000? 100,000? The question is not about raw numbers but about what percentage of the entire site is affected. Heck, amazon probably drops 700 pages every day.

[bonehead84]

I've done this recently and it was perfectly fine. I removed 150+ pages of content and around 700 blank redirects (that were blocked by robots.txt so googlebot never saw the meta noindex). It's about 3 months down the road and I'm actively trying to get them out of the index and I still have about 90 left.

So you don't have to worry about a sudden impact, it takes time for Google to recrawl them. I've even been uploading custom temporary sitemaps to help (it does). What doesn't help at all is the URL Inspection tool and requesting indexing. If it runs into a 404 or Noindex directive then it never requests the indexing it seems.

If you upload a sitemap with all you took away and deleted, it will "verify the sitemap" and drop a ton out. Takes a couple weeks it seems. Then you'll get a ton of "Error" or "Valid but with Issues" in the new Search Console coverage dashboard. From there you'll be able to "validate" each set of problems and wait a couple weeks again. It'll go through and zap most of them again, but not all.

Then I start over with a new sitemap and rinse and repeat.

[TomSnow]

Hi All,

Thank you for your input.

I'm going to be careful and do it in batches because, well, I might lose my job if something goes awry.

@Bonehead84

Thanks for the step-by-step. Very helpful. I'll use that,