Too Many Indexed Pages

[edmondscommerce]

A client site I am working on has an impressive 250,000 pages indexed in google.

Their strategy has been to target the long tail with a very large site structure optimised for pushing the product pages themselves. (product catalogue is around 100,000)

However the site itself doesn't have a massive page rank (i know pagerank isnt all that important, but its still a reasonable indicator)

another thing thats happened is that this client has dropped a bunch of badly performing products/suppliers from their range, meaning that they now have a lot of pages that are basically empty.

Should we be looking to monetise these pages with affiliate links etc?

Should we 301ing these pages somewhere else - home page?

Should we just leave them up there so they are in place on the outside chance that the client will re-enable these products/brands.

In a nutshell - what is the best thing to do with tens of thousands of indexed pages that are now a bit redundant?

Anyone with experience of this kind of dilemma I would be interested to know what you did and how it turned out...

Thanks in advance

 

[nbshopper]

Lol that's a fortunate situation to find yourself in... Umm if I was you I'd either:

a) Redirect them all to our site
b) More likely I would try and stick some affiliate ads on there to monitise them a little. Adsense if nothing else.

 

[DayTrader]

it's better if re-direct them as it's a better experience for your customers and google

 

[DotNetWebs]

...Should we be looking to monetise these pages with affiliate links etc?...

Personally I wouldn't do that as potential customers who land on these pages via search engines probably won't stick around (or return) if they just see a load of affiliate links.

Regards

Dotty

 

[jimmy555]

Empty crawled pages could create some problems from SEO perspective. If you are planning to remove certain pages then it is best to do a 301 redirect towards your main domain.

All your empty pages can display a customized 404 error page which should include sitemap of your important links.

I hope it will help

 

[Magsite]

on the empty pages put some like PRODUCT NAME is no longer stocked, and then have a search bar or list of categories, as they may look for another item.

You could add a google adsense advert, like I've done here, Reach Magazine

Then when the item is added again, the page is already indexed and won't take long to be picked up again

 

[edmondscommerce]

Thanks for the tips everyone..

Dotty - I think I agree regarding the affiliate links.

Maybe the best option then is to redirect to the home page or a customised search results page.