What should be done with old news articles?
-
Hello,
We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-nameMy question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.thx
-
Basically I don't see a reason to remove old news articles from a site, as it makes sense to still have an archive present. The only reason I could think of to remove them is if they are duplicate versions of texts that have originally been published somewhere else. Or if the quality is really crap...
-
if the articles are good - then there just might be value to the user . Depending on the niche / industry those old articles could be very important.
Google dosen't like those as you probably have a lot of impression but no clicks (so mainly no traffic) or maybe the "score" is bad (bounce rate - not Google analytics bounce rate, but Google's bounce rate - if they bounce to serps that is).
Since you got hit by panda, in my opinion, I see two options:
1. No index those old pages. The users can still get tho those by navigation, site search etc but google won't see them. Google is fine with having content (old, poor, thin etc) if it's not in the index. I work with a site that has several million pages and 80% is no index - everything is fine now (they also got hit by Panda).
2. Merge those pages into rich, cool, fresh topic pages (see new york time topic pages sample - search for it - I think there is also an seomoz post - a whiteboard friday about it). This is a good approach and if you manage to merge those old pages with some new content you will be fine. Topic pages are great as an anti panda tool !
If you merge the pages into topic pages do that based on a simple flow:
1. identify a group of pages that covers the same topic.
2. identify the page that has the highest authority of all.
3. Change this page into the topic page - keep the url.
4. Merge the other into this page (based on your new topic page structure and flow)
5. 301 redirect the others to this one
6. build a separat xml sitemaps with all those pages and load it up to WMT. Monitor it.
7. Build some links to some of those landing pages, get some minimum social signals to those - to a few (depending on the number). Build an index typoe of page with those topic pages or some of them (user friendly one/ ones) and use those as target to build some links to send the 'love'.
Hope it helps - just some ideas.
-
I do think that any site should remove pages that are not valuable to users.
I would look for the articles that have external links pointed at them and 301 those to something relevant. The rest, you could simply remove and let them return a 404 status. Just make sure all internal links pointing at them are gone. You don't want to lead people to a 404 page.
You could consider putting /archive/ in your robots.txt file if you think the pages have some value to users, but not to the engines. Or putting a no index tag on each page in that section.
If you want to keep the articles on the site, available to both google and users, you have to make sure they meet some of this basic criteria.
- Mostly Unique Content
- Moderate length.
- Good content to ad ratio.
- Content the focus on the page (top/center)
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 can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
How to handle broken images on an old site post migration?
I am working with a client who migrated their site prior to starting their SEO work with us. In a crawl of broken backlinks, I found some old image files with links. Ideally, I would like to redirect to an appropriate image, but I have no way of knowing what the image was because the page it was on is now dead. Does anyone have a way to identify and handle broken image files from a site that has already been migrated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Old sitemaps after site migration.
Hi, I was wondering if it's safe to remove all the sitemaps from the old site in search console? It's been 3 months since site migration from http://sitea.com (301 redirected) to http://siteb.com. Therefore, can I delete the old sitemap from the http://sitea.com from search console? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
YOAST SEO: How to set rel=cannonical tags to the original article post
Hi Mozers, Can anyone tell me how to set the rel="canonical tags via SEO YOAST? I have an article posted on my blog that was published first on another blog and i need to reference this entry somehow, I have been told to use rel="canonical - if so I would appreciate some insight on how to do this exactly! Thanks very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Is using frameset to usurp PR from an old domain okay?
I have a competitor who leapfrogged in Google SERPs after they purchased a domain that was let let go by a related authoritative organization and used it to redirect traffic from it to their website using frameset code. Is this a legit practice? Is this blackhat SEO? Here's the entirety of the code from the retired domain: <html> <head> <title>www.competitors-website.com title> <META name="description" content="www.competitors-website.com"> <META name="keywords" content="www.competitors-website.com"> head> <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0"> <frame src="http://www.competitors-website.com" frameborder="0" /> <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> frameset> html>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Linesides0 -
What strategies to best use to boost rankings across long-tail articles on site?
Heya! I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic. It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high). Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget). Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages). So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering: Focussing on building links to the homepage and to any other pages on the site, by asking for links from community members, doing linkbait articles, directory submissions, guest blogging, and so on. Long-term aim: increase our domain-wide MozRank and MozTrust. Build links to our long-tail articles specifically, most popular first. Get direct links from relevant blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, etc. Long-term aim: get to #1 on Google one page at a time. Something Else? I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest? Happy to provide additional details if it would help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cairmen1