What do you do with old web pages?
-
I have a wordpress blog that I've made a ton of changes to. I have about a dozen pages on it that have old information or I no longer have a use for. In retrospect, I probably should have used the old pages for new content instead of building new pages. Should I just leave them on the site with no links to them, should I mark them as noindex, or should I delete them? I think some of the old pages could be completing with my new pages for ranking due to similar content.
Website is: http://continuumweddings.com if you'd like to check out my site.
Thanks,
Melissa
-
Not sure what you meant by " wont be wasting any content,"
A 301 redirect will only redirect incomming links to the new page, the content value of the old page or any inherent authority it had will not be passed.
It will no lnger exist, only the incomming links will exist and can be redirected
-
Thanks! I actually have a Pinterest buttom in the menu and link to it at the end of all my blog entries. I'm obsessed with Pinterest but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to use it for my business.
-
Casey is correct.
If you already have written new pages, there's no need to update the old ones. Redirect them 301 to the most consistent new page you have.
Anyway, in the future, try to consider to use one of tips I suggested in one my last comment in the SEOmoz blog: you can read them here > http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday#jtc165757
Psst... I've seen the site and, sincerely, it is one of the best sites about wedding photography I've seen so far. Just a suggestion: being the photos so important both in the site and the blog, I warmly suggest you to add the Pinterest button to your site and to partecipate in Pinterest as I truly believe that it is the social network perfect for a business like yours.
-
I second that! It would have been best to update the old pages.
-
The best thing to do would be to update those pages with new & fresh content. But if you have already made new pages which are out ranking and competing with your old pages you can do a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages. This way you wont be wasting any content, and any authority the old pages had will be passed along to the new pages.
Since your using WordPress you can use Simple 301 Redirects Plugin to make it easier.
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
-
Spammy page titles
Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that Google aren't showing the page titles for my online shop anymore. They're set up with a third party plug-in piece of software, and while it's an old version of the software, the developer said it wouldn't be causing issues. They have suggested that I re-write my page titles to be less spammy. The thing is, Google haven't attacked just spammy looking titles, they're just taking a swoop through my whole site and not showing any of my page titles in their search results. I'm getting "Category Name - Shop Name" showing. Here's some of the page titles no longer appearing and I honestly have no idea how to rewrite these to not be spammy. Are there any good articles on what's spammy and what isn't? "Coconut oil - best tasting in Australia. Buy online from <my business="" name="">"</my> "Discount Vitamix Blender. Best deal in Australia. Buy online from <my business="" name="">."</my> "Natural & Organic skin care for the face | buy online in Australia from <my business="" name="">."</my> There are others that are showing the real page titles, but I think it's only a matter of re-indexing before they're all not showing. Any clue?
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Description tag not showing in the SERPs because page is blocked by Robots, but the page isn't blocked. Any help?
While checking some SERP results for a few pages of a site this morning I noticed that some pages were returning this message instead of a description tag, A description for this result is not avaliable because of this site's robot.s.txt The odd thing is the page isn't blocked in the Robots.txt. The page is using Yoast SEO Plugin to populate meta data though. Anyone else had this happen and have a fix?
On-Page Optimization | | mac22330 -
Title Tags for Index Pages
What tactics do you use to change the title tags of your index page so they're not all the same? For example, if you have an index page that has 100 pages, each with the same title, what tactics do you use to give each page a unique title and how important is it?
On-Page Optimization | | felt0 -
Autogenerated pages
My main product is database conversion software. As it supports tons of databases, it's fairly easy to generate thousands of landing pages simply by variating source/target database names, connection information etc. In fact, I autogenerated almost 25k pages that way. As I didn't want to jeopardize my main site, I placed all that content to a new microsite (www.fullconvert.com) which had no history and no inbound links. Results were nice - site is live two months and in second month already had 1300 visitors. Now, my question is - should I create the same thing on my (old and rather authoritative) main site www.spectralcore.com? I could use a different template to avoid duplicate content. Of course, my main concern is being penalized by Google. In my opinion, this autogenerated content is fine because it provides (tons of) laser-focused landing pages, so visitors will instantly recognize they found what they're looking for. But Google might disagree! What do you think? Is there a danger in trying to leverage authority of my main site in adding 20k+ autogenerated pages with inbound no links to them?
On-Page Optimization | | metadata0 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
How to fix duplicate page content and page titles?
Apologies in advance if this has already been answered (it probably has) - I'm just not seeing it. Is there a guide on here for how to fix the issues brought up by the crawler - specifically, things like duplicate page content, or duplicate page titles? A lot of these seem to have been created by wordpress.org combos that I didn't anticipate - i.e., category pages, author pages, etc. The crawler brings up the problems, but I don' t know where to start to go about fixing them. Also, any guide on best SEO practices or fixing optimization problems, specifically for wordpress.org blogs, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | prospects1 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770 -
Results in the On-Page
I put one site (www.fmredesdeprotecao.com.br) and register some keywords, but the keywords don't appear in the results On-Page like the other campaigns. How can I solve that?
On-Page Optimization | | Ex20