Removing Blogs and 301 redirect to blog home page?
-
Hi,
I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess. It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were:
-
Sales(ee)
-
less than 400 words
-
Flat out bad blogs
When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links. So in your opinion, what would you do? Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page?
Thanks
-
-
Seems to me if the posts were valuable enough to link to, maybe you shouldn't be getting rid of them. You should noindex or redirect them instead.
It's probably best to create a list and decide on a case-by-case basis what you want to do with them. I'd customize my 404 page to explain that a site cleanup was done on XYZ date and if you (a visitor) are here because you can't find the post you were looking for, I recommend ... and point them to your human readable sitemap or the main blog page. Then I'd go thru the post inventory and redirect the pages with links and/or social mentions to the closest related page or main blog page. The other ones I'd noindex. Any you miss will land on the 404 page and understand what has happened.
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
-
Is it possible to avoid redirect of penalties for 301 forwards?
We have been doing a good amount of competitive research lately and have noticed sites that have been changing their TTLD quite often to escape manual penalties / DCMA filings. An example evolution: brandterm.com -> brandterm.bz -> brandterm.me These competitors are able to quickly rank for money keywords in the top 3 soon after another domain switch. What we have noticed is that while its obvious they received Google penalties they continue to 301 redirect the old domains to the new ones. We have experienced first hand that penalties travel along domains with 301 redirects. Does anyone have an explanation how these companies are able to achieve quickly high volume of organic search while 301-redirecting from burnt domains? The only option I see is to disavow all previous domains in GWT to be able to employ 301 redirects without risking carrying over the penalty. Are there other theories ppl can think of? T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petersocapro0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Yoast Seo + Home Page
Hi All, I'm using Studiopress Genesis Enterprise child theme in Wordpress + InstantWP + Yoast SEO. I have created a standard home page (see image) along with bespoke pages My question is this: When I select Pages | All Pages ... I cannot see the home page and therefore cannot optimise the home page with Yoast SEO. What am I doing wrong? Thanks Mark XQvbFl2taJEgFXJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
Hello, I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website. I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware). Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content. The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere). This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience. When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages. When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway. We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way… I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover. We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda. So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions: 1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)? 2. If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did? Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric1 -
Duplicate WordPress Home Page Issue
I have an issue where I've created a site, (www.tntperformance805.com), using WordPress as a CMS. I enabled the option to use a static page as the home page, and created that page as /home. Well, now the issue that exists is that Google is indexing both www.tntperformance805.com, and www.tntperformance805.com/home/. I've already setup a 301 redirect, pointing /home/ to the main domain, and even have rel=canonical set up automatically, pointing every page to the www version of that particular page. However, Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting the pages as having duplicate page titles and descriptions. I've even had the page removed from Google's cache and index. I'm assuming Google is not considering the 301 redirect, even though it's setup properly. Should I add rel="canonical" href="http://www.tntperformance805.com" /> to the body of the /home/ post, to ensure that it is giving credit to the main domain? I am assuming the page is only redirecting to , as that's the www version, but I thought the 301 redirect would enforce that the search engines should give all credit to the main domain. Thanks in advance for the help everyone. I look forward to some insightful feedback. Best Regards, Matt Dimock
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | National-Positions0 -
How much is too much content for a home-page?
Hey guys, I'm looking to implement a strategy where I put a 20,000 word article on my home-page. It won't be a super-long page, this content will be divided into nested tabs. The content will also be found on individual pages (corresponding to the tabs) on the site, but these will have a canonical tag pointing to the home page, Will I get penalized for this kind of structure? Cheers, JC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trx0 -
Probelms w/ 301 Redirects
I am trying to 301 redirect my old site to the new site (under the same domain. Most of the 404 urls are 301 redirects from 404 pages but they are still able to redirect. I need help understanding why I cannot redirect half of my list. <colgroup><col width="636"> <col width="342"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia
| OLD URL | 301 To: | Status |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/all_inclusive.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/los-picapiedra/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/outside-us-telephone-listing.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/restaurantes/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/reuniones-eventos/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/grupos.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/gastronomy.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/lowest-rate.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/piscinas.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/playa.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/restaurantes.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/accommodations/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/habitaciones.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/dining/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/events/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/flintstones/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/royal/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicio-real.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/sitemap.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
| gastronomia.html0