A question was asked by John Mueller by an SEO that when to delete tag or category pages on your website. On this, John reverted that you can delete those pages so that there is no actual impact on your organic search traffic, if those pages have almost no traffic or no visibility.

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The question was asked in the last Friday’s SEO hangout at 12:30 Time where the SEO asked:

I have a WordPress blog in which I have created some tags and categories. So what happens– now I want to delete those tags and categories. These tags we created for some post, but these tags don’t have any backlinks. And these categories also don’t have any backlinks. And if I delete, what will happen? Google will down my rankings, or it will not.

On this John Mueller Reverted the following:

So just because there are no external links to those pages doesn’t mean that Google would not be able to find them. So that’s kind of the first thing, because especially if you have posts that have tags and categories on them, then you have links from the posts to the tags and category pages.” He then explained how to look to see if these tag and category pages have any visibility. John said “So what I would look at there instead of external links is how those pages are currently being shown. So in Search Console in the Performance report, look at the individual tag and category pages or the group of those pages. And then based on that, you can make a decision. Can I just delete these pages? Do I need to redirect them or not? If there’s almost no traffic or no visibility of those pages, then cleaning that up is perfectly fine.”

For this, we have 2 options either block google from crawling or indexing them or add the content to those pages in order to rank well.

Here is the video where the question was asked: