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Our website has 16 different languages, each in a subdirectory. hreflang is not implemented.

We are now trying to redesign the website and we want 6 languages to be active. The rest of the languages would no longer be supported.

Is it okay to remove 10 other languages? If we remove them, how would it affect SEO? I'm not sure how search engines index multilingual websites.

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  • Removing languages will result in reduced traffic. You can use the advice shared by Emirodgar to find out how strong the drop in traffic will be. – merkurios Oct 28 '20 at 11:56
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If you are using an analytics platform like Google Analytics you can check how much organic traffic are those languages generating. If you remove them, you will not rank anymore and therefore you will lose all that traffic.

If you are using Google Search Console you can also check the SEO impact they are generating in the performance report filtering by each language subfolder.

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Even if you use a 301 redirect to relocate those languages, the vast majority of the traffic will be lost as you will not have an optimized structure to rank for it.

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