Best way to handle outdated & years old Blog-posts?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have almost 1000 pages or posts from our blog which are indexed in Google. Few of them are years old, but they have some relevant and credible content which appears in search results. I am just worried about other hundreds of non-relevant posts which are years old. Being hosting hundreds of them, our website is holding lots of these useless indexing pages which might be giving us little negative impact of keeping non-ranking pages. What's the best way to handle them? Are these pages Okay? Or must be non-indexed or deleted?

Thanks

[BrvceTHW]

I can tell you what we do. With over 35 000 posts we are always tweaking the better ones and dropping the dead weight. I'm currently going through a bunch of posts from 2010. I run two quick tests on them - I check the PA [page authority] on Moz. If it's 1 then that's one strike, anything higher I consider working on the post. Next is a quick check in Google Analytics for traffic over the past 6 months. As you can imagine many posts from 7 years ago have 0 traffic. This is strike 2 and in my ballpark, 2 strikes means 'you're out!'. I delete the posts, a hard 404. As we cut the driftwood from our nets I feel we will be more efficient  at catching more fish.

[NoahKain]

I have a couple of suggestions for this.

1. You can 301 redirect the pages/posts that are low-quality to higher quality/more relevant pages, or you could even decide to rewrite the topics to update them in a new post to improve the content and then 301 the old posts to the updated content. If you decide to 301, you should make sure to use a rel=canonical tag so Google knows what pages are the right ones to index.

2. You can also recycle your high performing content into new posts. For example, if you had a post that was 10 Best _____ for 2010, you could rewrite the same post now, updating any neccessary info, and name it 10 Best _____ for 2017.

Hope that helps some. Let me know if you have any other questions.