Should I delete older posts on my site that are lower quality?
-
Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated!
I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site.
Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them.
From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content?
I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation!
Thanks
-
Hi Chris, thanks so much for the answer and thoughts on what you would do!
I totally hear what you're saying about the keyword stuffing. As I look back over it, it seems like it would make a great drinking game. Every time you read "Wyoming" you have to take a drink! (Would be a VERY short game haha)
Awesome. Based on your feedback, I'm going to go back through and make sure each article is:
-
Not keyword stuffed.
-
Interlinked effectively and organically.
-
Cut any crazy confusing wording.
Thanks again Chris. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to look this over and give your honest option. You rock!
-
-
Wow, so sorry about the slow reply here, things have been crazy the last couple of weeks!
Looking at a few of your blogs I see what you mean. They're not too bad but are probably a bit too keyword-stuff to keep as they are.
Having the keyword amongst the content isn't a problem (obviously!) but when it starts to feel unnatural, that's when you start turning users away. As an example, I had a look at this post and found the word Wyoming used 17 times in a fairly short post.
Paragraphs like this one really highlight the awkwardness:
From the moment you validate a business idea, to processing your business licensing requirements, incorporating in Wyoming, to finding the right financing, it takes up time, money, and effort.
I also noticed in that post that the first link points to the page you're already on!
Internal linking is important and for the most part appears to have been implemented quite well. If it were my website I'd be leaving the posts up but systematically working my way back through them to remove some of the keyword stuffing and fixing up any weird linking to make them read better.
As much as cutting them all and starting again would be technically correct, in the real world we need to make compromises like this to maintain existing rankings and income.
-
Thanks for the input Chris, I appreciate you taking the time to respond!
You hit the nail on the head for them being 'just ok'. No spam keywords or crazy re-directs. I would say that the readability isn't great and you can actually see the entire list here.
Engagement is horrible. The pages are indexed by Google, but get almost no traffic. When they do get traffic, the time on site is less than about 30 seconds.
As a note: If you check out the internal inking inside the articles on that list, its actually that which holds me back from removing the pages. I feel like the internal linking strategy is pretty decent and it may be cool to keep them. I'm just not sure it's worth keeping them on solely for that reason.
-
This is a tough one and a bit of a gamble either way I suppose. If the content was absolute rubbish (maybe horrible spelling and grammar or keyword-spammed) then the suggestion would be obvious - delete them and move on.
Being that it sounds like they're "ok" but just not up to your modern standards, the decision isn't quite so simple. Having them on your site isn't going to make it any slower unless they're adding redirects or something else to your site, the issue is whether or not their low quality is hurting you and it's tough to say without seeing them.
Very generally speaking, if they're free of errors, don't spam keywords or talk about dodgy subjects like online casinos or pharmaceuticals then you're probably better off leaving them there since they will be passing some relevance signals and they are bringing you traffic.
The one other thing I'd suggest checking is user engagement on those pages. Since Google is looking at this too, having an average session duration of 4 seconds for a 2,000 word post is a pretty clear red flag that whatever that page is about isn't worthy of being in their search results.
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
-
Server and multiple sites
We have multiple sites selling similar products in different ways but have always kept them separate on the off chance that google does not like it or they penalize one site. We have always put them on different servers but now thinking for performance as they are on shared hosting to put them on a single server which would be our own but we do not know the SEO considerations. We can assign multiple IPs to a server but I am not 100% sure whether there is still a negative impact of running multiple sites on the same server even if from a different IP. Any help would be appreciated, what I am really asking is could if they are on the same server with different IP's be still linked together by google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Is this site buying backlinks?
dankstop.com Almost all of their links come from mainly the same few sites, and some of their links have a really high spam score.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tlorenzi0 -
Link building - BBB, high quality associations and also botw.org
Hello, We would like to gain some quality links to compete with the competition. We already have about 70 backlinks. We are an eCommerce site. We are thinking of adding the following links: BBB online 2 high quality PR5 associations in our niche (one is $500 and the other is $200) A couple of less expensive but still quality partner listings, probably in the $40-100 range botw.org For current and future Google standards, do you think these will improve things? Do you see anything wrong with adding these? We want a clean link profile for as far into the future as possible. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity. Some obvious things:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SoundsLikeJoy
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEO My client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool. I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up. Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.0 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Getting Back Links When I Cannot Add Outbound Links to My Site
I have a collection of websites that I do not control in terms of content or page creation/editing. As a result, I have no way to add links to outside sites on any existing or new pages. Given this, how can I go about finding and requesting other sites link back to our sites/pages if I cannot offer them a link to their site in return? I know that content is a link driver, but I do not control the content, so I cannot develop new content to help drive links. I appreciate any help/advice any experts can provide.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
What's the best way to set up 301's from an old off-site subdomain to a new off-site subdomain?
We are moving our Online store to a new service and we need to create 301's for all of the old product URLs. Being that the old store was hosted off-site, what is the best way to handle the 301 re-directs? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VermilionDesignInteractive0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70