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I recently (4 weeks ago) added a new section to my website, the new section was related, but not as related as it probably should have been. I'm having second thoughts as I fear it has diluted my sites primary topic and weakened the whole site as a whole. I've noticed much less traffic from all the major se's although it could be some other reason I'm not aware of.
Anyway, I would like to remove this new section (there must be perhaps 5K pages in this section) - all pages in it are complete page names (i.e. domain.com/somepage-34_1.htm) and many are indexed. My question is, If I remove all these pages, will search engine bots reindex them as 404 and give my custom error message (in the summary in results). Could it also give other bad effects to remove so many pages?
Is there a safe way to do this?
Any suggestions would be great, thanks.
stuartc1
