What is the best way to remove old pages (if at all)?
-
Hi,
I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them.
My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content.
Thanks!
-
Do all of the pages receive back links? It would be a laborious job and perhaps not worthwhile but you could look at which of the pages receive a substantial amount of links or links from high quality websites. Then just include the "Good" pages in your new site.
Like you say, I think you would benefit from losing some low value content that doesn't rank well and doesn't have many quality links pointing to it.
Whatever you decide it would be interesting to know how that effects your site. Perhaps even worthy of a YOUmoz post?!
-
Be very careful about dumping massive amounts of content. It's not all about how many visits came from search. It's also about the sum-total weight of the site. If you've got 50,000 pages, that's 50,000 internal links to the home page. Take away 30,000, that's a massive hit. Even if each of those pages or the majority of those pages send a tiny little twinkling of link equity, just add them all up.
I've seen client sites take major hits removing that old "worthless" content against my advice. And as an SEO, I then get to step in and say "here - try getting all those old pages moved over now." Then watching as they rebound afterward. Slowly. Painfully.
-
Thats a tough call. Would you redirect the old pages? If so where would you redirect them to? Redirecting to the home page is not a good idea. I would be cautious getting rid of content that has links to it without having somewhere to redirect thos pages.
It seems almost impossible to analyze all of the implications. Have you thought about removing older content in smaller batches? Maybe get rid of the least visited 5000 pages first to see how that impacts the site overall.
I am not sure I would be comfortable dumping that much content willy nilly without doing some testing.
Another option would be to make sure to redirect the old content to the category page so you don't just lose that link juice all together. I would highly recommend figuring out a redirect plan for that content. Losing the links is a bad idea!
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
-
Can You Get Better Ranking/Conversion by Reducing the Number of Pages?
I am seriously considering reducing the number of pages in a section of our website. We currently have 39 webpages. I'm considering reducing it to 6. The site architecture would make more sense giving recent design changes. And we could focus more attention on improving conversions from these 6 new pages. But I'm considering doing this mainly because I think it'll help us do a better job of communicating to and converting our audience. The new pages would be longish. The existing 39 pages are by no means stubs, but these new pages would be longer. Anyway, what I want to put out for discussion is the SEO impact. What are the good SEO reasons for reducing the number of pages? Can 6 well-done pages out perform 39 pretty-well-done pages? How many queries can one page rank for well? Is this SEO suicide? Honestly, there's a part of me that cannot believe I'm saying this, but I think my heart is in the right place.
Content Development | | justin-brock1 -
Should i 301 redirect my blog to the respective site or just 404 all the blog pages?
Hi guys, We plan to close down our blog, which is a subdomain to our anchor site. I need advice on how to keep the link juice and its SEO value. Is it better to 301 redirect the blog to the homepage of our site, or just 404 all the pages of the blog? Thanks
Content Development | | dimicos0 -
Where to outsource product pages contents?
We have been told to write good unique content for every products but we just don't have the skill nor the time. (english is not my first-language) Can anyone suggest where to find a good product content writer?
Content Development | | ringochan0 -
How Many Words on Page for Content When Optimizing a K.W.
I want to hired a writer to create content. When optimizing a keyword on a page, how many words (minimum) should I have on that content. Some writer use ''Word Count'' when fixing a price for text, before asking a writer, I need to specified ''How many word'' to included in the content. Thank you,
Content Development | | BigBlaze2050 -
Gallary Pages
We have multiple Gallery Pages on a website and they are all being indexed as duplicate content. I am assuming it's because there's no content on those pages. So, it's picking up the pages header/footer navigation and considering it content. I am not sure what the best way is to deal with Gallery pages. I want the images to get indexed, but not sure how to do this if I need to set the gallery pages with the thumbnails on it to noindex. Would it be smart to set the pages to "noindex, follow" or "index, nofollow" or do you have any other suggestions?
Content Development | | cmaseattle0 -
What are tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 keywords (pages)?
I am seeing these terms, but for the life of mine I can't understand what they are. Could anybody explain that in layman's terms? Thanks.
Content Development | | VinceWicks0 -
How to best implement "metered model" on a site
Hi, I'm scratching my head over how to best implement the "metered model" on a site without users being able to game it all too easily. Has anybody in this QA forums implemented one before and is willing to share his/her best practises and findings? Currently I think raising the bar to force everybody to login is a bad idea + we would still need to open the site for google and other engines and can be tricked that way. Also this might lead to some penalty (cloaking)? Using cookies might not be enought as I think almost every Internet user these days knows that this might be the #1 place to look and they are deleted in a second. Counting based on a users IP-adress is also a bit critical as this is not accurate enough. Should we just use cookies and hope for the best?
Content Development | | jmueller0 -
What are the best reasons not to use Wordpress as a CMS?
I'm a big fan of Wordpress (.org) as a content management system. However, I recognize that Wordpress isn't necessarily the best CMS for all ocassions. For those of you who don't like Wordpress, I'm interested in understanding your strongest reasons against. So, why not Wordpress?
Content Development | | Gyi0