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
-
Impact of Medium blog hosted on my subdomain
I am using the Medium blogging platform to blog, but it is pointed to my site and appears at blog.mysite.com. Since the content is hosted on Medium and pointed to my subdomain via an A Record / CNAME / etc... 1. Will my domain get credit for backlinks to the blog content? 2. If Medium changes in the future and no longer points to my subdomain, will I lose all of the backlinks I've built up?
Technical SEO | | davidevans_seo0 -
What are the steps to submitting a sitemap for a blog?
We are in the process of a website migration and need to submit a site map for our website and blog. What are the steps to follow for submitting a site map for the blog? Can we submit with just the /blog URL or do we need to include each category?
Technical SEO | | Sable_Group0 -
What Happens to the Existing YouMoz Blog Post URL If It Is Promoted to the Main SEOmoz Blog?
Howdy SEOmoz Fans, Im wondering what happens to an existing YouMoz blog post if it gets promoted to the main SEOmoz blog? Does SEOmoz do a 301 redirect to the new URL? It seems like the old post disappears, but perhaps I'm not digging deep enough. Anyone have experience with this happening on SEOmoz? I'd like to know so I can figure out how to do something similar to that on one of my own sites (promoting UGC to a main blog). Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup
~Scott0 -
Best XML Sitemap Generator for Mac?
Hi all, Recently moved from PC to Mac when starting a new job. One of the things I'm missing from my PC is G Site Crawler, and I haven't yet found a decent equivalent for the Mac. Can anybody recommend something as good as G Site Crawler for the Mac? I.e. I need the flexibility to exclude by URL parameter etc etc. Cheers everyone, Mark
Technical SEO | | markadoi840 -
When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high 😞
Technical SEO | | danielshaw0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Best Joomla SEO Extensions?
My website is a Joomla based website. My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO. I assume there are some good ones that can help my site. Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?
Technical SEO | | damon12120 -
Moving Blog to Custom Domain
Hi All - I am currently attempting to move a blog (companyname.blogspot.com) that has a 2/10 GPR to a custom domain name so that I can get my targeted keywords in the domain name. The new domain will just be www.targetedkeyword.com. There are easy instructions for doing this with the A record and CNAME changes in the Blogger help, but I am worried about losing rank and links if I do this. Can you guys help me understand what the ramifications would be, and how I can accomplish this without losing the 2/10 mojo? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0