seo question for the tube people. i have many category and tag pages that are thin, just a title and a grid of videos, almost no text. google is crawling all of them and i think they drag the site down. the options i see: prune the weak ones, noindex them, or beef them up with real text and internal links. what is working for you in 2026, and how you decide which category is worth to save and which to cut?
decide by demand, not gut. pull search console, the categories already getting impressions are worth beefing up with real copy and internal links. the ones with zero impressions after months get noindexed or pruned. no point spending a paragraph on a tag nobody searches for.
noindex the dead tags but keep them live for users, that stops them eating crawl budget without losing the pages people actually click. then take the few categories that get real traffic and write them a proper intro, curate the grid, make them worth indexing. the mess came from letting google index a thousand empty ones in the first place.
one thing before you prune: consolidate. two thin overlapping categories usually merge into one decent page with a 301, and you keep the equity instead of binning it. merge the near-dupes first, then beef up what survives, then noindex whatever is left.
went through this exact thing last year. put real text on the top ten categories, noindexed the hundreds of thin tags, and the site lifted over a couple of months. honestly the mistake was letting google index every auto-generated tag to begin with.
demand first is right, but i do it with the data. pull the impressions per category from search console, the ones near zero for three month are your merge or noindex pile. don’t guess which category is thin, you can just measure it. and when you noindex, leave the page crawlable so google can actually read the noindex tag. if you block it in robots it never see the tag and the page stay in the index forever. this mistake i see a lot.
i overthought this one hard. spent ages building a proper rules engine for it when the real answer was basically under N videos and no traffic, noindex it. automated that single rule and it swept up thousands of junk pages overnight. the dumb threshold beat the clever system and i felt a bit silly about it.
the option people forget is just fixing them. some of those thin category pages don’t want pruning, they want one solid block of real text and a few internal links and suddenly they’ve got a reason to exist. i’ve turned dead tag pages into rankers with about an hour of work each. kill the truly dead ones, sure, but don’t noindex a page that’s one paragraph away from earning its keep.
honest tube version: 90% of your category and tag pages are stuff you auto-generated and never once looked at. noindex the dead weight, keep the few people actually search for, move on. everyone wants some clever taxonomy and google just wants you to stop wasting its crawl budget on 5000 empty tag pages lol
that’s how we ran toplists back in the day too, funny how little changes. the categories that pulled hits got the real estate, the dead ones got cut. same instinct, new tooling. one thing from the old gallery world: a thin page that links well to your strong pages still earns its keep as a signpost, even if it never ranks itself. structure has value beyond ranking.
the 90-percent-thin version is the one people flinch at and it’s right. most auto-generated tag and category pages on a tube are near-empty duplicates dragging the whole site’s quality signal down. the fix is demand-first, keep and beef up the categories with real search demand, noindex or prune the long tail of tags nobody searches. a lean site of strong pages outranks a bloated one of thin ones. cutting the dead weight is a ranking move, not just cleanup.
the data part is what stops this becoming a guessing game. pull search demand and your own impression data per category, keep the ones with real demand, consolidate the near-duplicates, noindex the zero-demand tail. i’ve watched sites gain by removing pages, which feels wrong until you see the crawl budget and quality signal concentrate on what’s left. measure demand, then cut, and the cut is a gain not a loss.
same on the wordpress tubes. practical tip: don’t let the CMS auto-create an indexable page for every tag, that’s the source of the thin-page flood. set new tags to noindex by default, then promote the ones that earn demand. easier to earn your way into the index than prune your way out of a mess.
blunt but true for a big tube. the auto-generated category and tag pages multiply, and most will never have enough real content to rank, so they just dilute the quality signal of the whole site. the honest move is mostly subtraction, keep the minority with genuine depth indexed and noindex or prune the rest. you cannot bulk up thousands of near-empty categories one by one, so do not try. cut hard and the site read cleaner to google.
demand-first is the only sane way to pick which survive. the categories that actually get searched and pull traffic are worth strengthening, the rest are just thin-content drag. sort by real demand and the overwhelming pile of thin categories turns into an easy call, invest in the few with demand, bin the many without. beats keeping everything or cutting at random.
the thin-category-pages question comes down to the fact that on a big tube, index bloat is a real quality problem, because thousands of near-empty category and tag pages tell search engines the site is mostly thin, dragging down even the good pages, so pruning is not just cleanup but a quality-signal fix. so pruning thin categories improves how the whole site is judged. so treat pruning thin category pages as improving the site’s overall quality signal rather than just tidying, because a large mass of thin indexed pages affects how search engines assess the entire domain, so removing them from the index can lift the standing of the pages that remain, which means the thin-category cleanup has benefits beyond the pages cut, since the proportion of thin pages in the index shapes the site’s perceived quality, and getting the near-empty categories out of the index concentrates the site’s quality signal on the pages that genuinely deserve to rank, making aggressive pruning of thin category pages a lever that improves the whole site’s search standing rather than merely a housekeeping task confined to the pages being removed.
a few thin category pages wont hurt you. the problem is when a big tube auto generates thousands of them and the weight of all that piles up. its the scale that flips it from fine to a real drag, not the pages on their own.
if 90% of them are thin then noindex or merge the bulk and pour the effort into the handful that can actually rank. treating them all as equals is how you end up maintaining a pile of pages that do nothing for you.