Does A Low Quality Post With Pagerank Merit Deleting?
-
Hello,
We are cleaning up our low quality content on our website and we are struggling with the idea of deleting blog posts that have a pagerank of 1 or above, but pull in little to no views on the website.
My research seems to indicate that low quality content in terms of pageviews is possibly a negative for our website as a whole.
My dilemma, to delete the pages that hold rank or keep them?
thank you
Mike
-
thank you, time to clean house in a meticulous manner
-
Maybe you could get the videos transcribed (if they're transcriptionable) and add that content to the page. If you're getting search traffic to the page or to the video on youtube, I don't think I would worry about it. If not, you could put the video on a new url with new meta data and a couple new sentences--or the transcription-- and just let it ride until you can do more with it.
-
Chris,
One last question. Some of our low quality content is has got great quality video and I want to salvage these posts.
Am I right to put them as noindex follow to remove any potential penalties from Google for poor quality content?
thank you
-
Okay, thank you very much.
-
If you think it's low quality based on your standards and its not adding any value to the rest of your site or visitors, it's likely fair game for deletion. From the sound of it, any PR those pages have isn't going toward helping any other pages, so again, I wouldn't put much weight on the PR factor as you make your decisions.
-
Thank you, we are now doing just that, but in the first 2 to 3 years of our 4 year old blog we ran things, well poorly at best.
-
Okay, here is the problem.
We are a 4 year old blog, at one time we had a pagerank of 5. Suffering a manual action, Penguin and Panda we have been on the straight and narrow since 2 years ago. But, are just now realizing we still have problems.
We have 3,000 blog posts, my best guess is 1,500+ should be deleted because of the low quality of the content and the fact that we write and make much higher quality videos than we did before, a stark difference.
I wanted to hold onto pagerank pages for internal linking. I read an article and discovered that pages with pagerank can pass juice when noindex follow is attributed to them. So my strategy is delete anything that does not merit fixing, anything with pagerank that should be deleted, noindex follow until we can fix it?
What are your thoughts?
thank you
Mike
-
Mike,
Certainly, PR isn't the metric to go by in this! PR isn't necessarily the ideal indicator of quality. Go by the actual things that indicate it, like whether or not the page is getting any traffic from search, any referral traffic, whether or not visitors are clicking through to it from other pages on your site, whether they're spending any time on the page, whether it fits with your brand message and if not whether it can be revised to do so--those kind of things. Even a PR of nul or 0 isn't an indication that something needs to be deleted.
-
My advise would be to remove or improve anything of low quality, even if it has a good page rank/page authority. With search optimisation, I always think about the brand first and holding content of a low quality on your website will not help you in the future. Be sure to always think about content that will captivate, inform and provide value to your audience first.
Perhaps consider improving the content instead of deleting? And if you do delete it, redirect the URL to the most relevant blog post on your website and you'll keep some of that page's authority.
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
-
Non-indexed or indexed top hierarchy pages get high PageRank at Google?
Hi, We are creating some pages just to capture leads from blog-posts. We created few pages at top hierarchy like website.com/new-page/. I'm just wondering if these pages will take away more PageRank. Do we need to create these pages at low hierarchy like website.com/folder/new-page to avoid passing more PageRank? Is this is how PR distributed even now and it's same for indexed or non-indexed pages? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What happens when we delete all the outgoing links from a forum at once?
Hi all, We have our forum and is filled with spammy content and external nofollow links. I am just wondering if we can make all these links as plain text from hyperlinks (if we can); it's technically deleting all the external links. Will this impact negatively or positively anyhow as per Google? Please share your ideas. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
High clicks and low rankings - Correlation?
Hi everyone, we noticed while doing last month's reports that even the best performing campaigns have a few keywords that slipped - some up to 10 positions down. We know keywords fluctuate every month, but May was just a weird month for rankings. While looking at possible issues that caused this, we noticed that these campaigns' clicks have gone up. So while keywords have gone down, their visitors seemed to be on the rise. Is there a correlation? Maybe Google saw an increase in visitors and decided something's up and lowered the rankings (this sounds ridiculous - sorry! May just be pure luck, but thought I'd ask anyway). Has anyone seen a drop in their rankings for May also? I checked everywhere, and I don't think there has been a major update going on. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | nhhernandez2 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Two months - No Articles or Post Published in our blog. Moz shows less organic traffic.
Two months - No Articles or Post Published in our blog. Moz shows less organic traffic. i know i could not write - i was sick. organic search and keyword also. total pageviews dropped. DA increased by +3 and then -1 in last update. What should i do.
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Guest Blog Post or Article Content Should be Do-Follow or No-Follow Link ? Help Plz !
Many SEO writers and blogs after Google Matt Cutt said, You should not allow no-follow link in Guest Post. What should we do. ? I am allowing Guest post - what they ask in return a do-follow link to their site or blog. other articles or post i wrote about inspiration collected from different source or single portfolio site - i credit them(as blogger - we should respect them). What i am doing right or wrong ? Please advise and help me on this ! http://searchengineland.com/google-guest-blogging-for-links-you-better-nofollow-those-links-166218
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Google's not indexing my blog posts anymore! Why?
Google just recently stopped indexing my blog posts immediately after being published, why could this be? I would usually post a blog post and it would be in google results within 45 seconds, now they don't show up until 6 hours later, if at all (a few never even showed up). Also, my home page doesn't even refresh when I make a change to the site. My site is CantStopHipHop [dot] comI have all in one SEO, xml sitemap generator, and webmaster tools and nothing seemed irregular in the settings.I appreciate any thoughts/help/suggestions.
Algorithm Updates | | bb2550 -
PageRank Is Zero For Some Reason
Now, I'm not a stickler for pagerank, and actually haven't checked the pagerank of ANY of the sites I own and operate in the last year or two, but one of my cronies noticed the other day that our BathroomGetaways.com websites pagerank is 0, despite the fact it ranks well and gets a decent amount of traffic for a great deal of the terms we target. My guess is that we still just don't have the quality links we need, and we're working on that, but is there anything glaringly obvious that anyone else can see that can be the cause of this? One thing to note, we did take the site offline for 2-4 months or so towards the end of last year and just relaunched it in January of 2011. It climbed right back into the rankings almost immediately after our re-launch, so maybe that has something to do with it?
Algorithm Updates | | AarcMediaGroup0