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Looking for expert thoughts on removing some language subdomains

Hello, We run an ecommerce shop that's been sinking in the rankings for over a year now. We have always traditionally not paid a huge amount of attention to SEO and have had great success simply by offering our products in English but also in a large range of other languages (at this time 30). By doing this we hit a lot of markets that weren't being targeted by others. Our translations are dealt with automatically by a plugin called Gtranslate and so are machine translated by Google Translate. We've done some digging and have decided to remove 8 further languages as we're not doing a great deal of business there and this would reduce the overall size of the website by 80,000 pages, which is obviously significant.

One of the languages is Japanese. Japanese users account for around 50% of all users on the website and Google Analytics tells us that they have an average engagement time of around 1 minute and a bounce rate of 46.9% whereas say the UK has an engagement time of around 9 minutes and a bounce rate of 26%. I am looking for thoughts as to whether we should remove the Japanese language section (/ja/) and redirect it back to the English language section to hopefully increase the average engagement time and decrease the average bounce rate of the overall website. The Japanese come to our website in droves but rarely purchase anything and our thinking is that the number of them with such a high bounce rate and low engagement time is making the whole website seem less "helpful".

I would really welcome your thoughts as to whether this is a good idea and if it is how best to achieve this. If we do effectively remove the /ja/ in the URL they'll be directed to the English version which might, in the short term, create higher bounce rates and lower engagement times. My thought was to do this redirection as well as using the webmaster tools removal section to remove all Japanese language URLs from the index.

I would very much welcome your thoughts as to whether this is a good idea and whether it is likely to have a positive effect on our rankings for other languages / pages.

Thank you for your help and time.

submitted by /u/Own-Feed-2567
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/QaxeZzJ
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