Removing large section of content with traffic, what is best de-indexing option?
-
If we are removing 100 old urls (archives of authors that no longer write for us), what is the best option?
-
we could 301 traffic to the main directory
-
de-index using no-index, follow
-
404 the pages
Thanks!
-
-
We have a busy blog with lots of very temporary content. About once a year we delete a couple thousand posts. However, before we do that we look at analytics to see which pages are pulling traffic from search.
For pages that receive regular traffic, we first try to recycle the post. If that is not possible we create a page with evergreen content so that a 301 redirect can be done. All other pages are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.
-
The best option would be to take the pages on a case-by-base basis.
Each page should ideally cover a specific focus. For example if an article discusses "the grapefruit diet" you can redirect the URL to another page on your site that discusses dieting. If you understand what users want from the page and have similar content, help your users make the connection they seek rather then 404'ing the page or dumping them on your home page.
If you do not have any similar content, check the page's backlinks. If there are none then I would let the page 404. This would be a good time to ensure your site's 404 page is helpful. A navigation bar and search option would be good to show on the page.
If the page has valuable backlinks and there is no related content on your site, perhaps the page still has value even though the author is gone. If you still wish to remove the page you should redirect the traffic to your home page or main directory as you suggested.
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Same content different URL - Google Analytics other Options
One of my clients came to me today asking to mirror their current website and host it on a different domain (i.e domain.com and domain.ca). Their reasoning is that there is no actual way to confirm via form entries from their website which visitors are submitting the form from an organic perspective and which ones are submitting the form through an Adwords ad campaign referral they are running (which I have nothing to do with). I know Google Analytics will show you visits to pages on a site and then you can find out which source (organic vs. cpc) they came from, but it won't confirm the source on the actual form entry. So my client feels the only way to find out this information would be to mirror the website so that the separate analytics would validate their Ad spend. Does anyone know of any tools that I could use for something like this? I do NOT want to mirror the website as I am fearful of duplicate content and the YEARS of organic SEO work I have put into this website going to waste. The other element I should mention is the client only wants to have this "mirorred" site up for 2 months. Any thoughts, suggestions and arguments for a mirorred website are welcomed! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
To index search results or to not index search results?
What are your feelings about indexing search results? I know big brands can get away with it (yelp, ebay, etc). Apart from UGC, it seems like one of the best ways to capture long tail traffic at scale. If the search results offer valuable / engaging content, would you give it a go?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
De-indexed by Google! ?
So it looks as though the content from myprgenie.com is no longer being indexed. Anyone know what happened and what they can do to fix it fast?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Best way to find broken links on a large site?
I've tried using Xenu, but this is a bit time consuming because it only tells you if the link sin't found & doesn't tell you which pages link to the 404'd page. Webmaster tools seems a bit dated & unreliable. Several of the links it lists as broken aren't. Does anyone have any other suggestions for compiling a list of broken links on a large site>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1