Removing blog posts with little/thin content
-
We've got quite a lot (I'd say 75%) of our blog posts which I'd consider as low quality. Short content (500 words or less) with few shares, no backlinks & comments; most of which gets 0-2 unique views a day (however combined this adds up).
Will removing these pages provide an SEO benefit greater than the reduction in traffic from the removal of these pages?
I've heard the likes of Neil Patel/Brian Dean suggest so, however I'm scared it will provide the opposite as less content is indexed and I'll actually see traffic fall.
Sam
-
Sam,
If you can safely assume that the pages are not hurting you, let them stay. It's certainly not ideal to have a website loaded with thin content. But, as is the case with most small sites, the posts are likely to do you more good than harm, provided you're willing to show them some attention.
Here's a good strategy to deploy:
-
Find the top 10 posts, as judged by analyzing GA and against the topics you hope to rank for, then beef them up with additional text and graphics.
-
Republish the posts, listing them as "updated."
-
Share the posts via social, using a meaningful quote from each piece to draw interest and invite re-shares.
-
Continue sharing the posts in the following weeks, each time with new text.
-
Gauge the performance of each social share, then use this information to create additional headlines for new posts, in addition to using it to inform you of what content might draw the most interest.
-
Repeat the process with the next 10 posts.
When you have thin, poorly performing content on your site, you aren't able to learn enough about what you're doing right to make a sound call. So to create more content, even "better" content, is likely a mistake. The wise approach is to use the content you have to investigate additional content ideas that would better serve your audience. Through social media and additional traffic to your site, you should be able to better discern what pieces of content will provide the greatest benefit in the future.
Additionally, the old content is likely to perform much better as well.
RS
-
-
It's difficult to talk in terms of truevalue. Someone of them may provide some value, but they pale in comparison to the new blog posts we have lined up and in my opinion bring the blog down; personally I wouldn't be sad to see them go.
I think it's time to exterminate.
Sam
-
Do the contents of these blog posts provide any value at all to the reader? Are they written well, and would you actually be sad to see them go? If yes, then refer to my previous response on re-purposing them to create even better content with more SEO value.
If not, and you're just worried about SEO, I'd say be rid of them. Based on those stats.
-
Thanks all, from my analysis:
In the last twelve months:
376 pages (although I'd estimate 70 of these aren't pages)
104 pages have bounce rate of 100%
307 pages have less than 20 unique views (for the previous 12 months) but the total count for this would be 1,374
which is a sizable sum.So the question is, is it worth pulling all the pages below 20 unique views and all the 100% bounce rate pages from the site? Will it actually benefit our SEO or am I just making work for myself?
I'd love to hear from people who've actually seen positive SEO movements after removing thin pages.
-
It's a waste of good content to remove it because it's considered "thin". In your position, I would consider grouping these under-performing/thin blog posts into topical themes, compile and update them to create "epic content" in the form of detailed guides or whatever is most suitable to the content. Add to the long post so that there's some logical structure to the combining of the little posts (and so it doesn't just read as if you stuck multiple posts together), then redirect the old post URLs to the newly created relevant posts. Not only do you have fresh content that could each provide a ton of value to your readers, but the SEO value of these so-called "epic" posts should in theory be more impactful.
Good luck, whatever you decide to do!
-
My rule of thumb would be:
Take all pages offline, which have under 30 organic sessions per month.
Like Dmitrii already mentioned, check your past data for these posts and have a look at average sessions durations / bounce rates / pages per sessions, with which you can valdiate the "quality of the traffic". If there are posts which have decent stats - don't take them offline. Rather update them or write a new blog post about the topic and make a redirect. In this case have a look in GWT for the actual serach queries (maybe you find some useful new insights).
-
Hi there.
Are those blogs ranking anywhat for any related keyphrases? At the same time, how about bounce rate and time on page for those 2 visits a day? Are you sure those visits are not bots/crawlers?
We have done similar reduction about 6 months ago and we haven't seen any drop in rankings. The share of traffic to thin pages was pretty small and bounce rate was high, as well as time on page was very short. So, why to have anything which doesn't do any good?
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
-
Longterm wordpress blog not providing seo benefit to main site - help needed please
Hi I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin. But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog. My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it? Further info: 1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains 2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015 3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here. 4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct. An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue? Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Warren_331 -
Bounce Rates: Leaving my domain.com/blog to shop on mydomain.com counts as bounce rate?
Hello! I have a kind of difficult question. On my main domain i have: Store: mydomain.com and wordpress blog on mydomain.com/blog If I have a link to a specific product on my blog and user goes to the product on the store, will bounce rate increase or as it's the same domain will be like a new page view? Different CMS's and blog is on a different analytics account than the store. I hope i could explain myself! Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Main Website Redirects to Mobile Website, Mobile Website counts this as direct traffic, is there a way to tell what the source/medium is?
Hello, The situation is that someone is arriving on my main website https://www.example.com and being redirected to http://m.example.com. When this happens my analytics says that the traffic is all direct coming to my mobile site. However, I know people clicking on my google cpc, and some google organic users are hitting the main website and being redirected. Before we didn't have as good of a redirect on our main website so I could tell organic and cpc traffic coming in, now my main website has a huge drop in these categories because they are redirecting to mobile but I can't tell on my mobile how much traffic from each is going to the mobile site. Is there a way to fix this? Is it because my main website is https:// and mobile is a http:// (as I know that sometimes makes traffic direct) or is it a bigger problem that can't be resolved? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | oxfordseminars0 -
Strange Spike in Direct / None traffic
Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source. All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots. I'm worried for a couple of reasons: A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings? B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports? 7kwsJnB
Reporting & Analytics | | Dave_Eddy0 -
Fresh Content Still As important?
We have an internal debate, that perhaps y'all can help us resolve. In the past "freshness" of content has been important, correct? (Google's QDF for example) In the past (to present) when we build a site with the intent to SEO the site, we build the core pages with the expectation that we will be adding more site pages as the project progresses, thus settling the "fresh content" factor. But it has been proposed to us, from a client, that completely building the site out with all the pages you hope to rank, getting the upfront bang for your buck. The expectation is that the traffic soars right-off. Now the client says that he has been doing this for years and has not been affected by any alog changes. (although we have not seen proof of this from him) So our question is this: Is it better to provide a website full of fresh content at the beginning of the project, for a jumpstart on traffic, then leave the site alone ( for the most part) or Is it better to have core pages of fresh content at the start, and build out new pages from their, so the website remains fresh every month? And can you prove your argument? (we need cold hard facts to be convinced 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Britewave0 -
Large content snippets showing up as keywords?
I've started to notice something very strange: the search keywords report in analytics show a bunch of instances where a person copied large snippets of our site content and then pasted it into the search box. Half these searches are coming from the US and half from...India. I'm worried that this may be the sign of a competitor attempting to perform negative SEO on our site (though admittedly I don't know how). Anyone seen anything like this? Advice? Thanks!!
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Conversion rates by browser & OS - any feedback/experts/experience?
Hi, Ive been evaluating conversion rates by operating system and by browser for a client. Ive picked up significant and somewhat disturbing trends. As you'd expect the bulk of traffic is coming from a Windows/Internet Explorer combination. This is unfortunately one of the worst combinations (Windows/Firefox & Windows/Safari did worse. Chrome/Windows was significantly the best combination with Windows). Windows also performs much worse than Mac. E.g. Windows/Firefox performs worse than Mac/Firefox. Overall conversion rate for Mac is 7.07% compared to 5.69% Windows. This is based on hundreds of thousands of visits and equates to tens of thousands of dollars difference in revenue. Generally later versions of browsers perform better on both main operating systems e.g IE 9.0 converts at 6.33% compared to 8.0 at 5.80% on Windows and Firefox 4.01 on the Mac converts at 7.57% compared to 3.6.16 at 6.54% (although this dataset is smaller than Windows/IE). Page load speeds (recorded in the clients analytics) are significantly faster on Mac than Windows (as expected really). Being Windows/IE and specifically Windows IE8 represents the bulk of traffic should we be addressing this? Will any optimisation negatively affect better performing Mac/Browser combinations? Understanding that Mac users equate to 'better' converting visitors - what else could be done there? Anyone have thoughts or experience on optimising pages for improved conversion rates via IE and Windows? Thanks in advance, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyMacLean0