: Can reducing # of indexed pages increase professional keyword ranking vs. long-tail non-related rankings? I have a site that does social media analytics. We have many long term pages with analysis

I have a site that does social media analytics. We have many long term pages with analysis of social profiles (~18M indexed pages). We have a pretty good link profile, from many related & professional sites, and almost no links from problematic websites / spammy / adult websites. We're getting considerable traffic from SEO, but a considerable part of it is to shady content covering issues that are totally irrelevant to our link profiles, and many times to pages in languages we have no links in. We're also not ranking at all for professional keywords that are very related to our link profile, titles, descriptions, content, etc.

I'm not really sure why this is happening, because I believe all the right signs are there. I'm actually looking to avoid the shady traffic rankings (trying to also remove those pages from our site) and hope instead to get professional rankings. I was thinking of reducing the # index pages from 18M to around 500k. Do you think that can help? Can you help explain why we're getting ranking for things that are totally unrelated to our link profiles and not to those that are?

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down