Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
-
We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited.
The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability.
Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.
-
I have to agree with you on making this move. Content that doesn't contribute to the quality of your site and receives minimal traffic should be removed. Besides ensuring the redirects are set properly, you can evaluate if these old content do actually make good material for future writing. It would be a waste to just delete them without any second thoughts. Some snippets of these old content can still prove useful and be spinned into new articles once you elaborate on them.
-
Great answers guys - thanks. It's good to know that my gut feeling was close to the mark!
-
Quality over quantity is definitely the order of the day, but before you drop some content completely, take a look at it and see if there is some useful info contained in it which could be consolidated into some of the content that you are actually retaining. Overall though a good content audit can be a good thing even if it means dropping some pages. Here's a useful article regarding content audits which is well worth taking a look at.
-
Sounds like a good idea to me. Make sure you have all the redirects in place to make sure when people want to visit the old content they're redirected to the new content. Also make sure you monitor the rest of your sites SEO traffic to make sure you don't fall in a hidden trap.
-
I think this pruning process makes sense. Although this will potentially decrease key words it will streamline the navigation for the content that is actually getting traffic. This will provide a better flow and potentially a lower bounce rate. Staging these cuts and monitoring the changes seems like a good way to manage your risk.
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
-
Two sites with same content
Hi Everyone, I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces Website A approx 12k listing pages Website B : approx 2k pages from one specific brand. The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name. Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code. The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evoe0 -
What's more valuable, a Blog or a Forum, and how to integrate?
We want to start a blog or forum (maybe eventually both) and are unsure what is the best way to publish it from an SEO standpoint. If the blog is published on our domain, like domain.com/blog then that obviously helps the site but if the base site is a for-profit business wouldn't it get less credibility, eyeballs, links as opposed to if you started the blog as it's own separate community on a separate domain and then just strategically linked to the for profit site (sponsorship links)? Essentially the question is, if I'm the Lucky Soday Company, do I start a Blog on the Lucky Soda website, or do I start a separate website to grow a soft drink enthusiast community blog / forum? I would guess a blog has more SEO potential than a discussion forum?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
Why doesn't my website crawl by Google?
Hi mozzers and members, I am having issues, why my website: http://profilecosmeticsurgery.com/ crawl by Google? let me share more clearly when this starts happening. A month or around 45 days back our website is being indexed and crawled quite well without any issues with having .html extension pages with static built website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOOOOOoooooooo
We finally thought to change to .php version and make whole website and its pages to be treated dynamically.
Once we changed all changes, thereafter this issues started. It has been more than 45 days, our website isn't being crawled since then. I didn't know what are the things preventing this to? Please help. Thanks in Advance Capture1.PNG0 -
Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
Hi Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Community Discussion: Are You Optimizing Your Brand's Content for Featured Snippets?
My latest post on the Moz Blog, Featured Snippets: A Dead-Simple Tactic for Making, explores how to keep Featured Snippets once you have them. I'm curious to know how many brands are actively working to get in the answer box, and for those who are, what's been the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ronell-smith2 -
Any reasons why social media properties are ranking higher than the site's own name?
The site below has social media properties and other sites coming up before it's own listing even for the exact search of the site name. Any ideas why this is happening? Link Any input is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Help with Best Content Posting Approach - WordPress site
I have a word document that i would like to add to my wordpress site as a page. The document has a large detailed flow chart of a complex legal process. (about 20+ boxes in the flow chart). I do not want to add it as an image because i want search engines to read/index the information in the flow chart. any suggestions to post this detailed flow chart on a WP page in the best SEO manner? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0