I have a plan to delete many thin content pages (more than 8000-10000 pages) from my websites. These pages created automatically by WordPress system, they are ATTACHMENT PAGES automatically created every time I uploaded the images files.
These attachment pages actually get some traffic also and some of it even proceed to the sales of my company (but only 3-5% of the total sales).
Each ATTACHMENT PAGES contain only:
- The image
- title and description (auto pulled from image's name)
- h1 (auto pulled from image's name)
- "p" and "li" tag (auto pulled from image's name)
- The attachment pages contain no internal link and external link.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about:
Someone told me that lots of thin content pages would hurt the overall ranking of the website. Actually my website has only 10 main pages which are rich in content (95% of sales are from these 10 main pages). All those ATTACHMENT PAGES are not off topic keyword content but thin and still relevant to the products that my company is selling.
I am a bit worry:
- Should I delete all these thin content attachment pages?
- Will the overall ranking of the 10 main rich content pages get better after deleting those thin content pages?
- If I delete them, it will return a real huge amount of 404 pages (8000-10000 pages) immediately in one night, will this have a bad impact on the ranking of the existing 10 main rich content pages?
- Is better to return 410 redirection if such a huge amount of URL will be deleted.