SEO - 20 years old website deleting old outdated pages a problem?

Marketing
1

I have a 20-year old site and have over 100,000 articles. Over 50,000 are old articles that do not meet today’s standards, plus they are irrelevant. Wouldn’t deleting them still hurt my SEO? I cannot create a 301 redirect for 50,000. Webmaster tools is already reporting like 1,000 missing pages.

Our ranking has dropped enormously, our SEO is killing us because of old pages. I’m afraid to delete 50,000 files and tanking more. Plus many sites link to us.

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

2

Well deleting old files would be difficult. why don’t you work on the new files instead of deleting the old one.

3

If your SEO is already falling perhaps it because of the out-of-date articles; current, fresh content will be good for SEO.

What’s difficult about pressing the delete button, @musmanali2020?

4

If the old files are disturbing then delete them. I also have an old site and its older posts do not have good quality content but i am not deleting them because they are not disturbing the performance and rank of site.

5

It would help if the following was known…

1.how is the site structured
2. how could 50,000 old pages be isolated from the 1000,000 total pages
3. does Google supply a list of the 1,000 missing pages
4. are the pages html, PHP etc,
5. are the pages dynamically driven from a database

Edited above

6

In this situation site rank will fall this is normal, because of lots of backlinks are deleted. It will takes time to get back in before rank position in search engine. Need to add new articles.

7

If you delete old pages, first make sure they aren’t getting any traffic… some f these may rank for longtail keywords. Take a look in your google Analytics reports to ensure they aren’t driving traffic. IF you really must delete them make sure you 301 redirect their URLs to another relevant page on your site…

8

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