Deleted products on store

[rakepl]

Hello all,

Sorry that I don't know there fit this thread. My store has been running for 5 years, we deleted 30K products and now we still have 70K products. Sometime my site runs very slow and because of many of them are out of stock, I have a question if I deleted products and their images to free space from for example 2010 to 2014 will have any affect to SEO and will correct speed of site ?

Less products will make less sql question, right ?

 

Thank you for answer and any advice.

 

I think if products are out of stock I don't want to disable them or redirect to 302, 301

 

 

[Dh42]

More than likely it is not going to help the speed too much. You might need to empty your connections, guest, and pages tables in your database. You can sort your database by table size and check them out. 

 

As for SEO I would recommend never deleting the product pages. I would leave them enabled and use them to cross sale. Basically what you do by deleting them is removing any SEO value that the pages have, utilize that value for something. Notice how AMazon and other big retailers never delete the pages. 

[moy2010]

What about disabling them and setting a 301 redirect, Dh42?

[Dh42]

It won't work as a long term solution. The reason being a major factor in ranking a page is the on page content. So once that is redirected, the on page content will be seen as changed to the new pages content. That will affect the pages ranking, but at the same time having the redirect will take the old page out of the index too. Then if there are any contextual links pointing at the old page, if the context of the page changes they will lose their value. From a UX perspective leaving them enabled is bad, but from a SEO market perspective leaving them enabled is good.