How to clean out dead-weight pages?

  • I’m trying to help out on a non-profit’s site that’s a bit of a mess. They have about 20 core pages on their site menu but 180 in their archive. They didn’t use the Post function, so basically anytime someone needed to make a temporary fix, they built a page out of it.

    I know Analytics show the most-visited pages but is there a way to determine the least visited pages or at least the ones that have no actual links pointing to them? We want to clear out some of this dead weight but if one of the standalone pages has decent search presence, we’ll keep it.

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  • maybe you should just convert them to posts

    you can create a sitemap

    https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

    and see which pages aren’t found on there (it will crawl the site).

    you may want to remove NEXT and PREV <link>’s in header though so that it’s only real links found when the bot crawls the site:

    remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link', 10, 0 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head', 10, 0 );

    —

    as for search, you could google webmaster tools has a TON of features that can answer those questions for you, even without Google Analytics. Or get Google Analytics going for a month.

    I wouldn’t recommend removing the pages that you consider “dead weight” unless there’s a very good reason too.

    The big reason for this is that Google and all of the other serach engines will know about those pages, and when you remove them, they’ll see that action as you making the site smaller (less content). Search engines love sites with content. The more the better. Because of thise if you go and remove 100 pages from a site with 180 pages, you’ll kill the search engine rankings for the site for a while, and they will not return to what they were before.

    Just think about it before you do it.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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