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Our website has several important categories, most of which have hundreds of products that are essential to our growth.
However, we had two categories with many products producing little revenue. I would call them aged because they’d been on our website for more than three years.
I wanted to make a big move on our website and hopefully improve our rankings. To do this, I decided to remove the two categories altogether.
Was I crazy? Let’s find out what happened.
How long did these categories exist on our website?
We were young’uns and new to the game four years ago.
Even though we’ve built businesses in the past, none had been eCommerce websites. We also had an active agency then but had never worked on a full-fledged eCommerce client website.
The categories in question did not produce much revenue. They were just causing the dev and sales teams a lot of headaches.
If I were to give it a percentage, it would be less than 5% of our total revenue.
We have a thesis in SEO that website bloat might cause Google to stop crawling your website at a certain point since we all get a budget from them.
This is also true in business. I believe these categories took too much of our time and produced very little.
So, what were the results? Let’s discuss how we removed these categories, when, and the results.
What did we do exactly?
It was simple, really.
We exported both sections, mapped everything out, removed the products, and forwarded every single URL to the homepage.
This isn’t rocket science. We simply had to get rid of these categories and forward everything to the homepage.
Now, keep in mind that none of these products and their categories are related to any other category on our website. It wouldn’t make sense to forward them anywhere else other than the homepage.
Our results
The task was completed on September 27th, 2024.
We didn’t see any adverse side effects.
Don’t be fooled by the extra clicks in the previous period. A viral video brought a lot of branded search traffic to our website.
Do you know what the best part is? Our other product categories did not decrease in rankings.
All is well so far.
Final thoughts
This wasn’t a long post, but it was an important change to share.
The goal of this SEO test—and relief for the sales team—was to see if we could remove aged categories and emerge unscathed.
Clearly, we had no issues and continue to grow. I can’t believe I am saying this after working hard and not seeing results for almost two years.
Our team will continue improving the website. Our work never ends. As you’re all well aware, there is no such thing as perfection.
