Site Cleanup Operation

[propertyhunter]

Hi,

I hope you can help, I have been asked to look at a friends site that is simply shocking, but somehow ranks for its main target keywords, mainly because they are easy.

But going through the site he has like 350 links on his menus that are all follow so I need to change them to nofollow, but should anything else normally be marked such as no index etc on a menu link.

Also upon doing a Moz scan there are something like 250 missing meta descriptions from old blog posts. When I looked closer they had been using the blog section for posting relevant news headlines, but thats it, So he has 250 useless, low quality blog posts. My question is, what should I really do with them, ie delete, redirect, canonical etc.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

Paul

[propertyhunter]

Thanks so much for the reply. I agree about the headline posts, I will more than likely delete them as there would be no links to them, only like 50 links to the whole site according to ose. Wrt the links, the site is a mess and requires restructuring which I think I am going to have to do. Thanks for the help. Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Marking some of the 350 links in his navigation menus isn't going to help anything, Paul. You may be thinking of the situation a couple of years ago where nofollowing links would "save" some of the page's authority to be passed to the remaining links instead, but that hasn't been the case for some time.

In general, the only real reason to nofollow links is to mark them as untrustworthy (as in the case of blog comments) or as paid links which should not pass rank in keeping with Google guidelines.

If there are 350 links in the menus, the site a usability problem, as much as an SEO problem. Except in unusual circumstances, no site visitor is going to benefit from being confronted with 350 links in a page's navigation. The solution is to fix the problem by re-architecting the menus, not by trying to slap an "SEO Bandaid" on the mess. (Especial since, in this case, adding nofollow isn't going to help any anyway.)

As far as the news headline posts, there are a couple things I'd want to know before making a decision:

• Do any of the posts have incoming links pointing to them?
• Do the headline posts make up a large percentage of the total number of pages on the site?
• Are the posts essentially worthless to the visitor now that the news they mention is in the past?

If they don't have many incoming links and aren't really of any value to the visitor anymore, I'd be tempted to 301-redirect them to the primary News category page if there is one. Otherwise (and especially if they make up more than 15-20% of the site's total pages) I'd delete them and allow them to 404 - also making sure they were removed from the site's sitemap (both html and xml.)

Does that help?

~Another Paul