How can i safely eliminate wordpress unused tags?

[markdoel]

Hi

Over several years I used many tags ( more then 1000 ) on my wordpress website but most of them haven't  any view and haven't any clicks on google search .

now I want delete this old - useless - unused tags but I'm worried about seo problem like many 404 pages and problems like this .

Does anyone have safe way to delete these wordpress tags? how can i safely remove them?

[SolveWebMedia]

Hi,

I'd simply delete all the ones that get no traffic.

Do the rest provide value? If so? Consolidate the rest into logical useful tags.

We have done this quite a few times and removing the bloat has positive impacts.

You can crawl the site after with something like screaming frog to find any 404's. You can create redirects for broken pages. This will make sure no 404's exist.

I hope that helps?

PS

If you don't need tags at all you can remove them from the index to test the water...  If you have Yoast you can set tags to no index on this page: (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#taxonomies

Then if you don't need them and none are providing no value. Delete and apply redirects for broken pages if necessary.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Yes, but I would take it easy and go relatively slowly on this over the next few weeks:

1. Start by excluding the pages from search engines by adding them to your robots.txt.
2. Wait until this is picked up by search engines and you slowly start to see the pages disappear from their index.
3. Remove them in batches from your site (you can do them all at a time, but not sure what your risk is here in terms of overall traffic).