Google ranking might be affected removing old pages from the site?

[Armando Ruiz]

Hi there!!

We have a problem that might affect the Google ranking of our site.

In Google Search Console, there are many pages LCP problems.

Reviewing the section: Core Web Vitals > Mobiles > LCP problems (in mobiles), we can see there are 190 pages with the same LCP issue. Apparently, all those pages belongs to the same group: https://oursite.com/blog/...

Many of those 190 pages are in fact very old entries which are not visited any more. We wonder about the possibility of removing all pages pending from the url https://oursite.com/blog/ and afterwords, sending our sitemap to index again the whole of our site but without many of those old pages which are being found by bots, but which are not indexed anymore in the sitemap. 

To do this we don´t know which method would be better to use:

- temporary removal of url > Remove all URLs with this prefix >https://oursite.com/blog/

- delete cached url > Remove all URLs with this prefix >https://oursite.com/blog/

Our concern is that this might affect our Google ranking. We have more than 3000 pages indexed, and with this method, we will be deleting around 500 indexed pages with problems.

Agencies has recommended us to delete old and problematic urls, little by little, 50 a month.

Which way do you think is best in order to not loose a position in Google Ranking that is so hard to gain?

Or in other words. Do you think that this could improve it or could be detrimental to our position?

Kind regards

[Aymen Loukil]

Hello Armando,

This group is for web Vitals feedback discussions, not SEO/ranking issues.

Deleting pages with a bad LCP performance isn't a good way to approach the problem IMO. 

If an agency recommends I delete pages from my website just to remove the LCP report from Search Console, I would ask myself if it is a good agency. 

Kind regards,

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[Armando Ruiz]

True, and sorry for approaching in the wrong group.

Thanks, Aymen!!