What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?
-
Hi everyone,
On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients.
Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed.
I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do?
Thank you very much in advance.
-
You are welcome!
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
Thank you very much for your reply. This is exactly what I've done - I decided to delete all these irrelevant blog posts from our website and assigned a 410 status to them with custom page for users who land on any of these pages to make the user experience a little bit better.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my question
Alex
-
Hi there,
I would only keep the content that is related to the business unless you are getting a lot of traffic from these articles that are not related to heating systems and gas cylinders. Getting traffic it is always good to show Google that your site is interested enough to get visitors. If you decide to remove these blog posts, I would check if any of these irrelevant posts have any backlinks before you remove them. If they do have some links should try to redirect them to relevant pages that you would on your site or just keep them because of the high-quality links. It is a good idea to set up these deleted pages to 410 ( Page Gone) so Google will remove from the index much faster.
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
-
Looking for feedback on review website
Hello Moz community. I’m looking for feedback on how
Content Development | | Paul-Paquin-Golden-Financial
to improve this national company review/comparison website. We bring in experts in the industries we are writing reviews on. Well then conduct extensive keyword research and provide an SEO optimized recommendation content briefing to the writer. The writer creates the content including the high search volume and most relevant keyword phrases that people are searching for. We also make sure to match the intent of the keywords to Commercial intent for the content to ensure it matches our audience. For example, we brought in a leading audiologist and created the top Hearing aids for tinnitus.. How can we improve the process and site, any recommendations?0 -
Blog post generating irrelevant traffic. What should I do with it?
I have a blog post that has been generating more than 75% of my website's traffic month over month.-averaging about 1000 views a month. Awesome that so many people are finding and benefiting from this post, however it is really skewing my traffic. I have an 87% bounce rate, and I'm only ranking in terms related to this post as opposed to industry related terms. I'm not sure what to do with this blog post. I want to be able to better evaluate my website's performance and be sure I'm targeting the right audience in order to gain more leads. Would a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' be appropriate here? Thanks!
Content Development | | Ali_DeLeg0 -
How much do I have to differentiate syndicated content, exactly?
We have about 15-20 articles we'll repurpose on a partner domain (think: media outlet). To avoid duplicate content suspicion, how much exactly do we need to differentiate the content on the second domain? Yea, this is assuming we can't obtain a canonical for whatever reason. I've found some good advice here, but am looking for some quantification. Like: "A sentence/paragraph of introduction at the top of the piece, plus a link back to the original at the end of said introduction ought to do it." Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Tim
Content Development | | Jen_Floyd0 -
A good content calendar/organizer suggestion?
Does anyone have a good content calendar/organizer/software/etc to help plan delivering and pushing out content? I haven't ever used anything other than an actual calendar, and that doesn't seem to help all that much. Is there anything better out there? Any suggestions would be fantastic! Much appreciated, Ruben
Content Development | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can I get Google to re-evaluate my comany's website?
For the last few months I've been rewriting website descriptions for the company I work for, trying to comply with the Panda algorithm as best I could. There are about 400 items. Today I am going to begin working on titles and descriptions. Question: Once I'm finished and have run the site through SEOMoz's pro tools, I would like to have Google look at the site _**in toto **_once the changes have been made so that maybe we can procure some decent organic rankings. Can the site be resubmitted, and what is the procedure? Ps. Today I am asking my fellow employees to help me proofread each description for grammar, spelling, accuracy, and keyword placement. I am also asking for suggestions from them.
Content Development | | RScime250 -
Content Duplication for Job Posting
Hello! I am responsible for SEO of a job portal of a recruitment agency. We get 30-40 jobs every month which we post on a) our job portal b) other job portals (like monster, career builder, Naukri , etc). How do avoid content duplication? We can only post the same job descriptions everywhere. We always post the job on our site first and then the other job portals**. How to ensure that Google knows our portal is the original job posters and not other job portals.** Thank you.
Content Development | | peoplesutra0 -
How to organize content for ecommerce site
Hello, We've decided to create 24 articles of content for our ecommerce site, everything from an FAQ to history of the products to 10 articles on the top 10 products. Really useful to the user. How do you suggest that we make our content visible to the users? We could put a nice button on our right banner that says "Extensive Help Session" or we could put a banner on our home page or we could make it a tab at the top of the screen. We could additionally make a well organized footer with links to the articles. Or we could do all of those but that might be overkill. What do you suggest?
Content Development | | BobGW0 -
Can un-unique content damage my rankings?
Hi there, I run a blog @ http://ablemagazine.co.uk We produce our own editorial content for our print magazine. Which means I have a great bank of uniquely written content. I can usually afford to post 1-2 completely 100% unique articles a day. I've also been copy/pasting 2-3 articles from the BBC or The Guardian a day to keep up activity. Should I continue doing what I'm doing? Should I post exclusively unique articles? Thanks
Content Development | | craven220