Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
-
Hey all,
When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)?
My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant?
Thanks in advance,
Roman
-
for the original poster - what did you end up doing - and did it make a difference??
(and) similar question but different...
If suddenly some 90% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 10%?
in the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages.
does this make a difference these days??
keep in mind that the 4,500 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place.
will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 500 indexed pages?
tia!!
-
I would personally still noindex because I would never recommend deleting something that I have not seen when it comes to site architecture. This way you really are not lose anything and you revert if you need to.
You may find that the lack of drops you down in ranking I doubt that will happen I really doubt it but I would not want you to delete having not seen your site.
Hopefully That helps,
Tom
-
Thomas,
Most of these pages have no backlinks and contain dated information. Would you still noindex vs delete the pages?
Thanks,
Roman
-
You could go back and improve the pages if you have any URLs from other sites or back links pointing to your content and you deleted that will not be good. Plus Google Will probably not like that you chop your site and half. If they are really worthless pages no index them So your crawl budget doesn't get ruined. To me removing content because there's small problems with the Page sounds about idea very bad idea.
-
I'd recommend you do neither.
If you set them to no-index, these issues won't matter, but you won't have lost the pages and whatever value they pose. Plus, it's generally good to keep any pages that aren't of their own accord, detrimental.
However, if you'd rather not do this, I'd look more favorably on removing them than fixing each one. That's a lot of work for very little reward - most likely, at least. Really, the answer depends on how much time you have and how fixing them would weight against the benefit(s) of doing other things.
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
-
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?
We have added very little new website content in the last year. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week help improve our ranking in Google? A few years ago adding new content would've had quickly had a positive effect. Is that still the case? Or should we focus content creation resources in other areas such as social media? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Map with usability and SEO purpose
For my client I need to add some structure to its pages. The deepest pages are about restaurants and are sorted per city and then per province as a larger silo. I want to do this: Homepage > Provinces > Cities > Restaurant page This structure is optimal, but I as a usability freak I prefer making the experience cool for the users. I want to add interactive pictures that are cool for the user and hopefully are readable for the google bots, I want to do it like this: The homepage shows a map of my country that has the twelve provinces outlined, that light up when you hover over them. Then when you click a province you get to the province page. On the province page you see a large image of the province and see all cities where there are restaurants, when you hover over a city it grows a little and when you click it you arrive at the city page, at that page you will find a list of all restaurants that are available in the city. What I need to know is, is it possible for google to see these pictures as a nice site structure? Or do I need to add the ugly footer links and have pages with lists of links...? And what is the smartest way to structure this, flash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lebron270 -
Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013.
Having read this ( http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-a-subdomain-vs-subfolder ) & countless of blog posts on never to put your blog on a domain because a subdomain is treated as a different site & your blog traffic won't help with your main sites authority. I've always pushed for subfolder blogs. However I've been seeing a lot of blogs now and days saying that Google is now treating subdomains as the same site as your main site. http://www.brafton.com/news/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-for-seo-no-serp-benefits-for-subdomains-anymore http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/34173/subdomains-vs-subdirectory-status-as-of-2012/34366#34366 ETC... What does everyone think? Is it acceptable to have a blog in a subdomain in 2013? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
What next with SEO
I've been working on my site for over 2 years and have some very good links and now have a PageRank 4. My site has fallen down from page 1 to page 4 for 'Web Design London' which may be due to not putting much work into link building in the last 6 months. The site is pretty well optimised onsite but there are less that 20 pages of content. With time constraints in place because I have to run the business, would it be better to increase the content, seek out more links or outsource the work. Ideally I would do both but money and time restrict this. If I was to outsource, do you have recommendations and rough prices? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wpwebdesignlondon0 -
SEO for bigcommerce site
I have a site on bigcommerce platform .from Where do i need start SEO for these types of ecommerce sites.Looking for Experts ideas . Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Where is the Real Value in SEO?
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Company Blog Vs External Blog
Hi there, We write articles for our blog on a regular basis, maybe two times per week. One of those articles I usually place on an external blog first getting some external links pointing into my product pages and using a rel canonical on that article on my blog pointing to the external post, so that the external post get's all the credit. The reason I put this on my blog is I use this to point to from my email marketing activities. The question is, do you think this makes best practice? trying to get more out of this blog post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780