Best Practice to Remove a Blog
-
Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered
Hi,
I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site.
I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are
1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant.
2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed.
Thoughts?
Thanks
PS
A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404
-
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***
In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.
By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.
-
I agree also. Thank you
As far as subdomain or subfolder, I see no difference. Can you explain Kane?
-
Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.
-
In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.
On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.
-
The blog has little value, with almost no user traffic.
It will be redesigned in a subdomain on the site.
I am only concerned with crawlers/google crawlers etc..and being penalized for tons of missing pages by 404'ing
There is nothing linking to the blog
-
A few other questions for you first:
- Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
- Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
- Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?
A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:
- No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
- No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).
-
Hiya,
Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:
I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.
You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.
The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.
How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.
Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?
If you decide to remove you content:
Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.
Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.
I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to reduce blog Spam Score? It it effect in All type of blog
Hi, I am working on blog , and a few days ago when i check the spam score rise up to 1 to 10 ..i have searched many method on internet but it is not works. i am very worried about this. is it problematic. how can i fix this here is the blog - Jonakaxom Can anyone explain about this . what should i do now.....
Technical SEO | | Tormura0 -
Removing a URL from Search Results
I recently renamed a small photography company, and so I transferred the content to the new website, put a 301-redirect on the old website URL, and turned off hosting for that website. But when I search for certain terms that the old URL used to rank highly for (branded terms) the old URL still shows up. The old URL is "www.willmarlowphotography.com" and when you type in "Will Marlow" it often appears in 8th and 9th place on a SERP. So, I have two questions: First, since the URL no longer has a hosting account associated with it, shouldn't it just disappear from SERPs? Second, is there anything else I should have done to make the transition smoother to the new URL? Thanks for any insights you can share.
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Remove Bad Links Or Build New
Hello, After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links.... Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links?? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Blog on a subdomain vs subfolder?
Hi, Does anyone have data to show that a subfolder is better than a subdomain for a blog? From what I've read, it sounds like both are a viable option but you choose subdomain if you want to build your blog as a distinct entity. Do you get ranked more quickly with a subfolder? Do you see X% more lift? Has anyone tested or seen tests around this subject? Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0 -
What is the best method for indexing blog pages?
I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries. My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? Can we do this dynamically? And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | coxen000 -
Syndicating With Blogs
Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
What is consider best practice today for blocking admins from potentially getting indexed
What is consider best practice today for blocking pages, for instance xyz.com/admin pages, from getting indexed by the search engines or easily found. Do you recommend to still disallow it in the robots.txt file or is the robots.txt not the best place to notate your /admin location because of hackers and such? Is it better to hide the /admin with an obscure name, use the noidex tag on the page and don't list in the robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | david-2179970