What to do with bad webpage
-
Hello everyone,
I have a page in my website that has a terrible link profile (95% exact match keyword links.) What is the best thing to do with this page? It provides no value, and if anything it is hurting me.
Should I just delete the page, 301 it to an obscure page or something else?
Thanks!
-
Well there you go.
If you have a page (Page A) that was ranking poorly due to over optmization, then you 301 Page A to a new page (Page B), the 301 passes pretty much all the negative link equity from Page A to Page B. Therefore, Page B is going down the toilet now.
You just kicked the can further down the street, vs fixing the initial issue. aka You just kicked yourself in the pants. (you can insert what ever kicking analogy you like here for emphasis and/or humor, but don't beat yourself up over it).
That is why I mentioned above, the 301 is really not a solution in this case and you need to noindex the page or 404 it.
I am of the group that I try and minimize 404s as much as possible. There is only one page to 404 here, so is really a non issue.
-
CleverPhD pretty much hit the nail on the head with a much more concise version of what I was trying to say. +1 internets for you good sir or madam.
As for the 404... Google will not penalize you for having a page that isn't there. Too many 404s can be bad for user experience but in this case the pages you'd be 404ing are causing much more trouble.
-
Thanks!
The reason I am doing this is one of my pages has dropped from page 2 to outside of the top 500. I currently have this over-optimized page 301's to the (formerly) ranking page. I think this may have something to do with it.
If a page a page is 404, does Google penalize the entire site?
-
Ok, if you think there is a problem, see steps 1-4, but you have to ask yourself, is this really a problem? See end of this post.
Steps to consider
- Look at the link profile and determine if you can see where are these links generated.
We had one case where we determined that the issue was a competing agency that was building negative links to properties that we managed for a client vs the web properties that they managed for the same clients! We tactfully made courtesy calls to the clients to help them by describing the negative link patterns and inquiring if they used anyone else for web marketing etc and suggesting that they contact the other agency as the other agency may not be aware that this is going on.
We were able to not only stop getting the links being built, but we looked good to our clients. This may or may not apply to you, but just throwing it out there that you need to look at this at a higher level to help with a) stopping additional links from being built or b) getting links removed.
- I saw this in a tweet by @dr_pete the other day and I retweeted it as I thought it was a good article
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/the-latest-5-tools-ive-added-to-my-seo-toolbox/
There is a tool rmoov that is mentioned
http://www.rmoov.com/index.php
There is a free version and so this may work. Note, I have not used this tool, but it looks interesting enough that I would try it. May be worth asking the group here - have they used it and what do they think of the tool.
- Redirect or 404. If you 301, then all you are doing is redirecting the negative link equity to other pages on your site, or externally. Probably not what you want to do as then you are just spreading the negative link "juice".
You can either 404 the page and let it die. Or, if you want to leave up a simple page with no other links to other pages on your site and then add a noindex tag so that it gets removed from Googles index
- The Disavow tool. This would be only for extreme examples and if you had proof that these links were negatively impacting this page and/or had a penalty notice from Google. I only mention to be complete, but this is probably not appropriate for you.
All of that said, let's just ignore everything I mentioned above. If the only issue here that you have 95% exact match anchor text. While that can be a symptom of a "bad link" profile, is it really impacting this page? Are you seeing a decrease in rankings for that page for those key terms? More importantly, are you seeing decreased traffic to that page (as rankings are relative). Are you assuming there is a problem, when there is not one? So you have a page with a "too perfect" of an anchor link profile. Then just stop doing it on future pages and move on. You may not have hit a threshold that triggers a penalty just yet. Have to consider where you are spending your time. May may more sense to work on building value, vs correcting things that may or may not be negatively impacting you.
My 2 cents plus a dime.
-
No, no warnings. I would doubt it is a manual penalty also. I am not in a super competitive niche, and I am not a huge name in my niche either from an SEO standpoint.
-
Large amounts of spammy looking exact match keywords creating an unnatural link profile will do that nowadays. Have you received any unnatural link warnings because of them or seen anything that appears to be an algorithmic penalty?
-
Thanks for the response!
They provide no value. They are not bad per se as they are original articles that I wrote. What I did was the old Article Syndication trick about 6 years ago. These article databases point to a page of a product that I don't even really sell anymore.
The bigger issue I face is the page I 301'd these links to suddenly dropped out of the rankings in early March. It went from page 2/3 to outside of the top 500. I would assume that the article links may have something to do with it.
-
How bad are the links? Sure exact match can hurt now but would it be better to attempt gaining some more natural links to the page. Have you attempted to get any bad links pointing at it removed?
Does the page really provide no value? Does it get any qualified traffic which then disseminates to the rest of your site? Or is the page DOA?
Personally I'd say NoIndex it for now, see if there's better content you could add, work on removing links and getting better ones, and see if that helps. You wouldn't want to 301 bad links to another place on your site because it doesn't fix anything... it just deflects the issue for a while.
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
-
Kind of duplicate categories and custom taxonomy. Necessary, but bad for SEO?
Hello Everyone! I'm new here! My husband and I are working on creating a website: https://sacwellness.com .The site is an online therapist directory for the the Sacramento California area. Our problem is this: In wordpress our category system is being used for blog posts. Our theme is using a custom taxonomy system to categorize different therapist specialties, therapeutic approaches, etc. We've found ourselves in a position where our custom taxonomy and categories are near duplicates. for example we have the blog categories: ADHD counseling, Anxiety therapy, and Career counseling our corresponding custom taxonomy/therapist categories are: ADHD, Anxiety, and....(oops) career counseling. My understanding is that google doesn't see a difference between identically named categories and custom taxonomies and will so choose one to rank and disregard the other, effectively leaving you competing against yourself. is this true in a case like this? Can google maybe understand the difference because of the custom taxonomy and/or URL paths? if this is a problem is it ok to have near duplicates....like ADHD vs. ADHD counseling. This has been our solution so far....but now we're questioning it....derp x_x. I thought about tagging the categories with no index, but I think the archive pages would be useful for people. Essentially we have 2 sets of archives for each keyword. One is for blog posts, and one is for therapists who work with that particular issue along with the 6 most recent blog posts in that category.....because we are putting the 6 most recent blog posts at the bottom of the therapist pages I feel like it wouldn't be as terrible of a loss if we had to noindex the category pages. ....what do you think? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dunklea0 -
Good or bad adding keywords in Pinterest description?
I added all keywords in description. Will this affect my website, Google takes this as negative way? I am not adding keywords on my own website, but adding keywords to third party website? https://www.pinterest.com/pin/304555993526970292/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Significantly reducing number of pages (and overall content) on new site - is it a bad idea?
Hi Mozzers - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems? Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site. Thanks in advance for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?
If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Is a dynamic online user list bad for SEO?
Hello everyone, I have a question that is currently puzzling me, and I hope you can help me with. On musicianspage.com (one of our websites), we show a list of online users embedded within the page which, as you may expect, changes all the time according to who's online at that moment. That list appears on every page of the site, so at any time any page on the site has a different content and different link profile (sometimes we have just a few users connected, other times we may have over 50 users connected at the same time). My question is: is such a "dynamical-embedded" list bad, good or neutral from a SEO stand point? If it is bad, what do you suggest to do? Put it inside a frame? Using AJAX? Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome! Thanks in advance to anyone reading this. All the best, Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How to detect a bad neighborhood links?
I have the feeling that I am suffering from negative seo, so there is a way to get a list of links that should remove in the google disavow links tool ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0