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However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore.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
-
Blog hasn't ranked since reposting.
Hey Moz fam! I had a blog that was doing pretty well for the target keyword. Unfortunately, to make a long story short, we had an image in it we weren't supposed to so I unpublished it for a few days while we got that sorted out. Since republishing (with all the same content) it has not gotten a single impression. I inspected the URL and it is totally eligible but nothing in the way of organic traffic. Any ideas on how I can recover?
Content Development | | danieldaher1 -
Loads of Blog Search Results showing up in SERPs - What's the best way to remove?
Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much. We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either. The content on these pages is a short list of blog posts by each author. They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this: your company.com/author/joeblow Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created) We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP. Is there a better way to remove these search results? Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs? Thanks.
Content Development | | RosemaryB1 -
Duplicate Content
Hi Does anyone know a site where i can paste text to test for duplication? We've used some outstanding freelancer copywriters in the past but need to check the authenticity of the article created before publishing, Thanks Gary
Content Development | | GaryVictory0 -
Duplicate Content behind a Paywall
We have a website that is publicly visible. This website has content. We'd like to take that same content, put it on another website, behind a paywall. Since Google will not be able to crawl those pages behind the paywall is there any risk to ua doing this? Thanks! Mike
Content Development | | FOTF_DigitalMarketing0 -
Duplicate Content Discovery
I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape. My question is should I be worried about the footer? Is 28% a lot?
Content Development | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate content on the homepage
Hello SEOMOZ Is giving me an error on duplicated content on my site. When viewing the details it is showing the following as duplicated content domain.co.uk/ domain.co.uk domain.co.uk/index.html Obviously these are the same pages. Why is it seeing them as seperate. Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue? Many thanks
Content Development | | lcdesign0 -
Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site
I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?
Content Development | | andywozhere0 -
Best way to avoid duplicate content issues here.
I am planning to write an article that refutes some claims made in another article. The original article is a 20 page pdf. What I plan to do is to take quotes from this PDF and then under each quote write my arguments for or against the quote. If I take direct quotes from the article, is Google likely to see this as duplicate content?
Content Development | | MarieHaynes0