How to deal with lot of old content that doesn't drive traffic - delete?
-
Hi community, i hope someone can help me with this,
We are migrating our e-commerce site next februari. I'm preparing the content migration. For a large part exact copies of our product listing and product detail pages will be migrated.
However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore. It actually is just worthless content. (Not only as a traffic driver, this also counts for extremely low to none internal driven traffic (both internal search and internal navigation).We have about 4.000+ blogs of which about 100 drive the most traffic (mostly incited by e-mail and social campaigns and internal navigation promoted on important category landing pages during some period.
Is it a bad signal to search engines to delete these old content pages? I.a.: going from a content-rich to a content-poor site?
Off course I will migrate the top 100 traffic earning content and provide proper redirects to them -
Hi there,
It is not a bad signal if you are in fact deleting low-value content that does not drive traffic or back links. Content is becoming more of a 'quality over quantity' game (thankfully). If you are making your site more efficient for Google to crawl and condensing SEO authority (link juice) and pointing more of that your more 'important' pages, you could actually see an uptick in business from organic search. I will note that you should look at your blog posts to see if there are opportunities to update them to make them more informative and/or more current.
If any of the posts you are removing have inbound links or rankings, you will want to properly 301 redirect them. Take a look at these resources where sites removed old pages and maintained site performance or even saw an uptick. The content audit portion of your analysis is going to be crucial, you must be sure you are not deleting content that is driving traffic.
- Why We Deleted 900 Blog Posts And What Happened Next
Hope this helps!
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
-
Updating a Business Blog Article - Old or New Published Date
There are a few business blogs that I'm currently updating - include more details, information, case studies, statistics etc. The blog was originally published in September of 2016. Once I make the changes, do I keep the same original date or do I change the date to the day that i've uploaded the new information? Example:
Content Development | | Kdruckenbrod
Original Published date: September 2016
Updated Blog: June 2017. What date should the blog display? Thank you.0 -
What are some good examples of content marketing done well for clothing online retailers?
Hello, I am working on planning for a redesign of a eCommerce clothing website. Looking for some inspiration on some good examples of clothing companies using their content well. The design does not have to be the best, it can be just very well done use of blog type content or video. Thank you in advance for taking time to respond!
Content Development | | srbello0 -
Be brutily honest - What do you think of this old content?
My website reports on news relating to certain web hosting providers, and being hit by the latest phantom update a little I am looking back a little more harshly on some of my content with especially the older articles needing alot of work (I know some areas on the site need work), and there are some articles I am just not sure about. I have listed a few OLD articles below https://www.besthostnews.com/the-power-of-shared-web-hosting-by-bluehost/ https://www.besthostnews.com/siteground-sponsors-wordcamp-london/ https://www.besthostnews.com/free-ebook-guide-to-starting-a-website-on-a-budget-a-small-orange/ These are 3 old articles that I have previously updated several months ago, but are they good enough. Due to the nature of the site sometimes I will report on certain news \ features that a web host releases, and sometimes there is very little to write about. These are probably a good example where I feel there is a struggle to write enough or the quality is perhaps lower than something that has more information to report on. I would appreciate some harsh critical view points \ and perhaps suggestions on how to improve my writing style for these kind of generic style posts.
Content Development | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Reposting My Original Content
I wanted to know how I should repost my original content from my blog to other sites, obviously quality ones and legacy style content. I don't want get hit with any duplicate content or spam type penalties, but want to further spread some of my content from my blog to get it noticed and drive traffic and leads. Do I submit the posts as is, then put a link to the original source and if so, how many sites can i safely repost the same piece of content too? I am not trying to do anything sneaky, just want it to spread my best content to a good amount high authority sites. I already do social bookmarking and Facebook, twitter etc.
Content Development | | photoseo10 -
Recommendations Content / Copywriter
We are based in the UK & have used alot of content / copywriters & so far have struggled to find someone we feel meets our needs? Can anyone recommend a content writing company or freelancer? Thanks
Content Development | | webguru20140 -
On page content and PDF - Dup?
Hi We are writing a useful article which we want to put on our site, but we also want to add it as a pdf which people can download - will this be classed as dup copy?
Content Development | | jj34340 -
Duplicate content on forums?
I am creating a forum. I am concerned that when I create the forum, users will copy content from other places to post onto my forum. How negative/bad is this in terms of google eyes? I am concerned when people copy press releases and re-post it to the forum. Should I make a rule that all content must be typed and not copied? Or is a little copying okay?
Content Development | | sseibel0 -
Forum Site: Content Value Post Panda
I run a forum website built on Wordpress. We're about two years old. The theme of the site is a directory of attorneys, with each directory listing having its own blog account on our site. Through this platform, we receive 75-80 blog posts now every month of varying quality from our users. QUESTION: A good number of the blogs published on our site are also published on the attorney's law firm site as well (they're syndicating on our site). Will this hurt our site in light of Panda? A lot of the syndicated content is very well written and insightful. By contrast, Will non-syndicated but average to below average posts hurt our site? The authors almost always link back to their firm site. Would love some feedback on whether we should be happy about the syndicated content or whether we should potentially ban it?
Content Development | | JSOC0