Best Practice to Remove a Blog
-
Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered
Hi,
I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site.
I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are
1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant.
2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed.
Thoughts?
Thanks
PS
A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404
-
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***
In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.
By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.
-
I agree also. Thank you
As far as subdomain or subfolder, I see no difference. Can you explain Kane?
-
Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.
-
In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.
On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.
-
The blog has little value, with almost no user traffic.
It will be redesigned in a subdomain on the site.
I am only concerned with crawlers/google crawlers etc..and being penalized for tons of missing pages by 404'ing
There is nothing linking to the blog
-
A few other questions for you first:
- Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
- Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
- Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?
A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:
- No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
- No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).
-
Hiya,
Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:
I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.
You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.
The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.
How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.
Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?
If you decide to remove you content:
Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.
Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.
I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.
Hope this helps!
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
-
What's best practice for cart pages?
i don't mean e-commerce site in general, but the actual cart page itself. What's best practice for the links that customers click to add products to the cart, and the cart page itself? Also, I use vanity URLs for my cart links which redirect to the actual cart page with the parameters applied. Should I use use 301 or 302 redirects for the links? Do I make the cart page's canonical tag point back to the store home page so that I'm not accruing link juice to a page that customers don't actually want to land on from search? I'm kinda surprised at the dearth of information out there on this, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places?
Technical SEO | | VM-Oz0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
Best practices for switching site languages around
Hi folks. The site in question is at http://bit.ly/UDV186 It is split into English and Spanish versions, each at root/en and root/es respectively. The home page is in Spanish. We're trying to rank the site for English keywords so we want to switch the homepage to English and put the Spanish version as secondary. What are the best practices for this? Can we just literally swap the two versions around onto the existing URLs, i.e. take the English text and put it onto the home page? Provided all links point to the correct page, would that be fine? Are there any other best practice considerations to take? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Paging Links Code - Best Way?
Currently we are using previous 1 2 3 next for our link to other inventory pages, with some variation of this javascript code javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$phMain$dlPagesTop$ctl01$lnkPageTop','') . Can search engines even index the other pages with this javascript? Is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Can a site be removed from alexa?
let's say you have complete control over the webserver, and the hosting server. is there a way to set it up so that alexa statistics CANNOT be gained?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
Optimal / Best Practice Title tag
Hi Guys, Am I write in saying google will take / create many variable from your title tag? Graphic, Web Design and Online Marketing in Ireland | Company Name results: Graphic Design, Web design, Web design in Ireland, Online Marketing in Ireland, Online Marketing, Graphic and Web Design, etc etc. (plus lots of long tail there as well). Would this be considered the optimal way as 'Design' is the common denominator for Graphic & Web. Then Ireland can be common to every other keyword such as Graphic design, Web design, Online Marketing. (in ireland) The reason why I ask is: lately I've notice title tags being stuffed with keywords and don't actually read correctly in the SERP My suggested way could have more benefits plus it reads well. Your thoughts, thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Blog on a subdomain vs subfolder?
Hi, Does anyone have data to show that a subfolder is better than a subdomain for a blog? From what I've read, it sounds like both are a viable option but you choose subdomain if you want to build your blog as a distinct entity. Do you get ranked more quickly with a subfolder? Do you see X% more lift? Has anyone tested or seen tests around this subject? Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0