What to do with 40 short articles to make room for 5 good thorough ones
-
Hello,
On my life coaching website, I have 40 articles that I want to replace with 5 good ones (to get up-to-date in modern content writing). The new articles will be long, thorough, and graphically stimulating.
What do I do with all these old short articles. There's no backlinks on them, but they are gaining a little traffic. I'm not sure I want them around since they're not high quality enough. What's normally done?
-
Thanks guys.
I guess I could delete them. If I did keep them where on a site do you put these old articles? I don't want an article section with 45 articles in it, I want one with 5 articles in it.
-
Ok, if you are confident that the 5 articles are good enough to cover those 40 articles which are not that great in quality, you can go ahead and delete them and then make a 301 redirection. However, if some of them are having good ranks, I would suggest retaining the article and making changes in the body content. Choice is yours.
-
Ok, so this is a bit confusing... you want to publish the same information in the 5 new articles that you have in the 40 short articles? If this is the case then idea is to 301 old articles to the new one so that you don’t lose traffic. There should be no debate about the link juice as you said there is no link pointing to those pages...
But if the information is different and the previous 40 short articles have different information then the 5 new once then in that case leave them as it is if they are not damaging the user experience because it will help you gain a little traffic but if you think there is absolutely no value in those pages and it might hurt the user experience in that case killing the pages is the best idea!
-
It would seem to me that if your 40 articles material is covered by the 5 good articles, then you might want to delete them if you are more concerned about maintaining a higher editorial level to attract/maintain customers..
But if you are more concerned with traffic content, is there any reason why you can't maintain all the articles using different keywords?
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
-
Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
Hi all, Can you help me figure this one out? I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords? I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies. Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong. Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights? Thanks, Leebi
On-Page Optimization | | Leebi0 -
Url lenght/depth - Short or specific?
Hi, I'm trying to decide the best structure for a directory my site offers (containing all the businesses working in the field) and I'm not sure whether to choose something shorter or being more specific. So, I have 3 variables: Type of business (I mean, specific sector) Region City And I'd like to give some strength to every one of it. So, the complete URL (the one I'd like to use) could be: www.mysite.com/sector/region/city/business-name What I was not sure about is...is that too deep? I mean, even thought I'd like to perfectly categorize them and give some strength to every sublevel, I'm not sure about having the business-name so "far" and so "deep". Thank you for your ideas!
On-Page Optimization | | Daniele_Carollo0 -
Best way to move traffic/juice from one page to another?
I’ve got some pages that provide information on some companies in my website topic space, and also corresponding pages that allow users to rate and review those companies. So, for example: Company A information Company A reviews Company B information Company B reviews Google searches for “Company A” or “Company B” generally result in my information page ranking #2 behind the actual company’s website, and the reviews page ranking #3. (Probably not good to have two pages ranking for the same keyword in positions 2 and 3). The information pages do very well in Adsense while the review pages do not. The review pages have always had comments open for reviews, and I’ve just recently opened the information pages to comments. This has resulted in less of a need for the reviews pages as the comments on the Information pages are now serving the same purpose. I can even add a star rating to the information pages if I want so the review pages are completely unnecessary. So, I’d rather strengthen my information pages 1) to more solidify their rankings, and 2) get more visitors there than the review pages as they convert way better in Adsense. Question is, what is the best way to proceed? Option 1: remove internal linking to the review pages (I have sidebar links too), so less link juice just naturally goes to the review pages. On the review pages, direct people to click the link to the information page to go there instead. Eventually, the review pages will fall off the front page of the SERPs and people will just go to my #2 ranked company information page instead (and maybe #1 if I’m lucky, but doubt I’ll get ahead of the brand). Option 2: 301 Redirect the review pages to the information pages. Functionally, this would work well for me, but I fear that Google may not like it for some reason. My information pages are ranked so well that I do not want to risk them dropping. Are these fears unfounded? Is either of these two options better than the other, or does anyone have a better idea? Whatever I do, I don’t want those company information pages dropping from their #2 positions.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
Authorship for articles with more than one author
Hello, Is there any way to do authorship for articles with more than one author listed? If so, how?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Why Isnt My New Article Indexed?
I posted this article last night: http://www.londontri.com/325/tomtom-runner-gps-watch-review It didn't appear in Google's index this morning despite me pointing a few high quality links to it (not keyword optimized links, just links from high quality forum posts) On closer examination I thought that the problem could be due to a keyword stuffing penalty so I have made sure that I am not repeating too many words/word combinations using a keyword density checker but the article is still not indexed. Any ideas what could be going on?
On-Page Optimization | | ross88guy0 -
Content Optimization - Multiple Keywords or One?
I have three web pages I'm trying to increase traffic to (and thus conversions). I've carefully researched and selected 15 keywords. There's about 3-5 keyword groupings that are similar enough so I can optimize each page with all of them (for example - autobody, dent repair, scratch repair). I see a couple ways to approach optimizing the pages: select one main keyword to put in the header and support it with the other 2-4 keywords in the content body select 3-5 keywords and evenly optimize the page for each (several headers and sections about each) pick one keyword per page I'm constrained to three web pages since it's a clients website. Otherwise I'm guessing the best method would be to create content for each keyword in something like a blog. I basically see the pros and cons as this: including multiple closely related keywords on a page will bring more traffic and thus overal conversions; however it will take longer to rank for those keywords. Focusing the content on one keyword will increase conversion rate and take a shorter time to rank that page since it's more focused, but less overall traffic and conversions. With the page number constraint and increasing conversions being the goal of optimization, what are your thoughts on the pros and cons of each choice?
On-Page Optimization | | reidsteven750 -
Moving content from one site to another
I have a couple established, content rich sites with some content that I would like to move over to a new site. My question is what steps I need to take to ensure that neither my older sites nor newer sites are penalized for duplicate content. The purpose for moving the content is to add some depth to the new site for users, as well as possibly optimize it all for SEO. There is a fair amount of content involved, about 50 posts and pages per site, so I'd like to know if the potential problem with duplicate content might be serious enough that I should think twice. What do you recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Is it better to embed my longtail article or give it a separate url?
Within my e-commerce site I have jewelers who using uncommon techniques and maetrials. I have a few long tail type article ready to publish about these niche topics. My site navigation has each jeweler as a category with their often changing products within their category. I am thinking I would add an article to the artist-category content. But in the past, I have put "how to" or "what is" content in an article section of the site. This way I could link to it from several places. With the long tail in mind, would I be better off adding the article to the jeweler's category page? If I have a 2nd jeweler using this same technique, I am thinking I would rewrite the 1st article including different long tail phrases. Thank You for Helping- Handcrafter
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0