Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?
-
I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/
It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings.
When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve.
I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website?
Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.
-
This is a very valid question, in my opinion, and one that I have thought about a lot. I even did it on a site before on a UGC section where there were about 30k empty questions, many of which were a reputation nightmare for the site. We used the parameters of:
- Over a year old
- Has not received an organic visit in the past year
We 410d all of them as they did not have any inbound links and we just wanted them out of the index. I believe they were later 301d, and that section of the site has now been killed off.
Directly after the pages were removed, we saw a lift of ~20% in organic traffic to that section of the site. That maintained, and over time that section of the site started getting more visits from organic as well.
I saw it as a win and went through with it because:
- They were low quality
- They already didn't receive traffic
- By removing them, we'd get more pages that we wanted crawled, crawled.
I think Gary's answer of "create more high quality content" is too simplistic. Yes, keep moving forward in the direction you are, but if you have the time or can hire someone else to do it, and those pages are not getting traffic, then I'd say remove them. If they are getting traffic, maybe do a test of going back and making them high quality to see if they drive more traffic.
Good luck!
-
Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.
Things not addressed in that thread:
- If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
- The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
- Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
- The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.
-
Haha I read this question earlier, saw the post come across feedly and knew what I needed to do with it. Just a matter of minutes. You're right though - I would've probably said remove earlier as well. It's a toss up but usually when they clarify, I try to follow. (Sometimes they talk nonsense of course, but you just have to filter that out.)
-
Just pipped me to it
-
Hi Xpers.
I was reading a very timely, if not the same issue article today from Barry Schwartz over at SEO Round Table. He has been following a conversation from Gary Illyes at Google, whom apparently does not recommend removing content from a site to help you recover from a Panda issue, but rather recommends increasing the number of higher quality pages etc.
If you are continuing to get more traffic by adding your new larger higher quality articles, I would simply continue in the same vein. There is no reason why you cannot still continue to share your content on social platforms too.
In the past I may have suggested removing some thin/outsdated content and repointing to a newer more relevant piece, but in light of this article I now may start to think a tad differently. Hopefully some of the other Mozzers might have more thoughts on Barry's post too.
Here is the article fresh off the press today - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html
-
Google's Gary Illyes basically just answered this on Twitter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html
"We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff"
So rather than spend a lot of time on old work, move forward and improve. If there's terrible stuff, I'd of course remove it. But if it's just not super-high quality, I would do as Gary says in this instance and work on new things.
Truthfully, getting Google to recrawl year or two or five stuff can be tough. If they don't recrawl it you don't even get the benefit until they do, if there were a benefit. Moving forward seems to make more sense to me.
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
-
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
One website with multiple advertising domains?
Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related. To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography. He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for. If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites. However would this be the optimum strategy then? One website hosted on: bozophotography.com A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page. So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business. I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com. There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Mobile website on a different URL address?
My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
Best to Post Dynamic Content (Listings) under "Posts" in Wordpress?
My commercial real estate web site is being migrated to Wordpress from Drupal. Is it advisable to place dynamic content that will use taxonomy under "Posts" ? Listings will be changed every few months and there could be anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of them on the site. Developers have given me different advice. One has been adamant that listings and neighborhood pages (there will be about 25 neighborhood pages) should not be in the post section which is to be strictly reserved for blog entries. The last thing I want is to create a site structure which is unfriendly to SEO!!!! I would very much appreciate the perspective of anyone proficient with Wordpress and SEO. Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
Better to optimize page, post or category in WordPress
Hello, This question is for the WordPress experts out there. I've always wondered if it is better for SEO to focus on a particular keyword by writing a page or a post dedicated to it. For example, if I want to rank high for the keyword "Seattle rocks", do you think I'd be better off writing a page titled "Seattle rocks" or a post titled "Seattle rocks". The ideal for me would be to create a category with the URL that includes that keyword for my WordPress blog, but I do not know if I can do a good job in terms of SEO optimizing the keyword. For instance, if we consider the keyword in the example above, I'd create a category which will have the following URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think I can still focus on that keyword having such URL? As you know, WordPress would allow me to write some text in the description tag, which will be visible on the site. I guess that I could use the description box to create some optimized content using the keyword "Seattle rocks" and then launch a link building campaign using the anchor text "Seattle rocks" directing to the URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think that I can optimize the keyword by creating a category? Thank you for reading such long question. I tried to be as clear as possible. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
How to move website to new domain?
We have a website that has run under the same domain name for the past 10 years. We have built up a decent amount of SEO "mojo" (and traffic) over time, however, the original domain name no longer applies to the business model. A little over 1 year ago we started using a new brand name for the website and created a landing page for that domain name. Everything on that landing page links over to pages on the original domain name (to preserve the SEO value that we have built up over the years). We would like to move all (or most) of the pages/content to the new domain name. Would using 301 redirects be the safest, most effective way of doing this? I have heard of other people doing it this way, and often they will see their traffic drop for a few weeks before it eventually comes back. Anyone else had experience with this? What worked? What didn't? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-mojo0