Does removing pages from a site help SEO?

Yes, removing pages from your site can absolutely help your SEO, if done correctly. Removing or consolidating URLs that aren’t helpful for users or that don’t line up with your business goals, can help your organic SEO performance.

CASE STUDY: Removing almost half of the articles pages from a client’s blog

The Approach:

We reviewed a client’s blog to determine how relevant the pages were to a user or to the business goals. In other words, will this ultimately help a user’s journey to a conversion or lead? For context: this was a travel company’s blog that had a lot of ‘hands in the pot’ over time writing articles. The first step of this project was performing a content audit of the entire blog. Below are some of the steps from the content audit:

• We determined two of the six categories on the site didn’t align with the business goals to help generate a lead or conversion
  • Any articles located in those two categories that still aligned with a potential for a conversion, we salvaged and redirected into one of the remaining four categories.
• Analyzed for any content duplication or near duplication (there were no duplication or near duplication).
• We looked for any topics that just didn’t align with the business goals at all for conversion, leads, or brand awareness. If any articles feel into this bucket, we ended up just placing a 404 status-code on those URLs to be removed from Google (or search engines).
• This is probably the most important step. We listed out all the URLs and analyzed the slug and primary keyword to determine if there were any articles competing for the same topical intent. There ended up being a decent amount of competing topic intents. Remember the a lot of ‘hands in the pot line’ from a couple paragraphs above? This is the result of that.
  • We actioned this by consolidating similar topic intents into the authoritative URL. To do that, we looked at which URL had the strongest performance, backlinks, and page authority between the competing URLs. From there, we consolidated and 301 redirected into the more authoritative URL.
• We need to caveat that during the implementation of redirecting or 404’ing URLs, we had a strategy set up to implement them over the course of four weeks in ‘three phases’. The URLs picked for each phase were set up so that the heavily trafficked pages were not all done at once. This would help eliminate the potential performance ‘shock’ as Google digested the new status codes.

The Results:

The end result is we consolidated or removed nearly HALF of the blog’s URLs. This might scare most people when hearing that but the results were pretty amazing.

• We gained almost 10,000 more impressions PER DAY
• Leads and conversions increased almost 20% in the first two months

In Summary: Does Removing or Consolidating Pages Help SEO?

The ultimate answer is yes, IF done correctly. It might be scary at first but with the right strategy in place, the end result of removing and consolidating pages at scale can have massive benefits for not only rankings, but also improved UX and user journey experiences which helps lead to additional leads or conversions.

We highly recommend using the guidance of an SEO expert to help audit, strategize, and formulate an action plan to help give the best ranking results for organic search.