Apart from running SEOCopilot, we occasionally take on large marketplaces as a service client. These domains often have hundreds of thousands of pages and tens of thousands of daily users.
Most often, the goal is not to increase traffic for one commercial keyword but for 200+ keywords.
Common Marketplace Problems
Marketplaces (or programmatic seo) projects have unique challenges
Rendering issues
Google cannot efficiently read the page
Crawl budgets
Googlebot only crawls a small number of pages
Dead content / content pruning
Google classifies the website as low value
Internal linking structure
Often, hundreds of thousands of pages are “forgotten” (=no internal link)
Big company politics
Making a change takes 3 months, you as the agency is still responsible for sales
Case study: Deleting 600k pages
When we took over, we utilized our content pruning algorithm to identify outdated content. Dead content is defined as pages that have not received a click in 12 months.
We saw that 600k pages never got a single click in the last 12 months.
We no-indexing 600k pages. It takes time to implement and it also takes time for Google to re-evaluate the site.
We did the cut beginning of June 2025.
Early results were encouraging. Clicks and impressions were up by 30%.
A few weeks later, we saw a very strong increase in the number of the number of pages that ranked for organic keywords.
4 Months later, the site continues to benefit from the content pruning.
The website is now ranking for roughly double the amount of keywords in the top3.
Only a fraction (~1%) of the original pages are indexed now.
🎉 This month, the business has the highest number of signups, user activity and revenue.
Why does content pruning work?
From the horses mouth:
“Our systems work primarily at the page level to show the most helpful content we can, even if that content is on sites also hosting unhelpful content.
This said, having relatively high amounts of unhelpful content might cause other content on the site to perform less well in Search, to a varying degree. Removing unhelpful content might contribute to your other pages performing better.”
Who should do content pruning?
Large sites with thousands of pages.
Small websites with less than 100 pages likely don’t see a big benefit from it.
If your Domain Rating (DR) is low (<30), you should consider to build foundational links first.
Directionally, the higher your Domain Rating (DR), the more pages you can index. We have seen hundreds of e-commerce stores that automatically built thousands of pages. Without any backlinks, the pages will not index well.