URLs include a directory without an index page, should it be removed for SEO?

Question

A client's website has the following structure:

• /products/product-1
• /products/product-2
• /products/product-3

These product urls are keyword optimised pages for organic search.

Google also indexes /products however this page has zero content i.e. the 'products' directory has been set up as an extra step by someone in the past because they liked the look of it I guess?

My question: Obviously the blank page is bad for SEO. My preference would be to create new product pages without any directory - this is a hierarchy that I believe would improve the page value overall e.g. /product-1

In total there are around 25 product pages, which means creating 25 new pages and implementing 25 301 redirects from the old to the new product pages.

I'm worried that nuking all of the old pages would cause more damage than the benefit we'd get from this (not sure how important but I imagine page age is a good quality indicator).

Would I achieve less disruption to ranking by putting some content on the "domain.com/products" and use it as a 'content hub' where we give a little info of each page and include a link to each organic landing page? This would give the page a 'purpose' when Google crawls it, this would also be easier to set up as it's just adding content to an existing page.

Answer 1

Why don't you benchmark rankings and then try the content hub approach first and see what happen? You may get a boost.

I personally am a fan of removing redundant steps from a funnel and the product pages would benefit from being a step closer to the homepage. That said, it would be disruptive and you would really need to be on top of your Search Console data to ensure everything migrated smoothly.

If you get no benefit from the content hub approach, benchmark and migrate would be my recommendation. There are plenty of case studies online that show the benefits of consolidation. Good luck!