Deleting low quality content
-
Hi there. I have a question about deleting low quality content pages hopefully anyone could share your feedback on.
We have a b2c ecom store and Product Pages are our target LDPs from search. We've built many information pages that are related to different products in the long past that are linked to related product pages.
Problem is many of them lack so-called quality content in terms of volume and quality and they aren't helping. Especially since early this year, organic traffic started declining after having peaked in Feb.
So I'm considering deleting those we and Moz consider low quality that are not receiving search traffic.
Firstly, is that a good idea? Secondly, how should I go about it? Just delete them and put a redirect so that deleted pages will point to related pages or even homepage?
Looking forward to any expert input.
-Yuji -
you do need to obtain seo advice, but often, we don't advise to delete the page but to improve it substantially.
If you have duplicated content, remove it and replace it with well-written, white-hat, high-quality content marketing. This is how we've improved many businesses' local seo by improving on-page SEO, rather than deleting it completely.
-
It would be best to talk to an[SEO Agency to get advice before you delete any blog posts or main pages.
-
Thanks for your advice. Yes, we will definitely be careful deleting pages. Thanks a lot!
-
That's a really good idea! Cut down what you have to manage to the essentials and then spend more time on those pages. Make sure you do some kind of ranking or traffic audit against all the pages though. You don't want to delete the versions of each page which have some (even if it is small) SEO power. You want to target the ones which Google isn't using
-
Thanks a lot for your feedback. It was helpful. I think we may need to remove pages leaving only unique ones and update their content to be more valuable. Thanks!
-
This is usually speaking **not the right mind set **to succeed.
When Google says (through decreasing ranking positions) that you haven't put in enough effort, usually deleting a poor attempt garners no favour in the ranking results. Think about it. Google are saying "you don't have enough quality content" and your answer is to delete content, thus having less than before. Does that seem like a genuine attempt to comply with the increasing stringency of Google's guidelines?
Deleting stuff is the easy way out. Think about it as if you wrote an essay in College and Google were the examiner. They Give you a D- for your essay and mark certain areas of your work as needing improvement. If you deleted those paragraphs, did nothing else and re-submitted the essay would you honestly expect a better grade?
Google want to see effort, unique content, value-add for end users. _Real _hard graft.
If you have high volumes of pages which are identical other than one tiny tab of information or a variable price, then maybe streamlining your architecture by removing pages is the answer. If most of the pages are unique in function (e.g: factually different products, not just parameter-based URL variants etc) then it's more a comment on the lack of invested effort and you must tackle your mindset if you want to rank.
N.B: By effort I don't mean your personal effort. I could also be alluding to the fact that budget was too low when producing content. I'm describing the site - not you personally!
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
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Sitemap and content question
This is our primary sitemap https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml We have a about 750 location based URL's that aren't currently linked anywhere on the site. https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml Google is indexing most of the URL because we submitted the locations sitemap directly for indexing. Thoughts on that? Should we just create a page that contains all of the location links and make it live on the site? Should we remove the locations sitemap from separate indexing...because of duplicate content? #
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvestSitemap Type Processed Issues Items Submitted Indexed --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 1 /sitemaps/locations.xml Sitemap May 10, 2016 - Web 771 648 2 /sitemaps/sitemap.xml Sitemap index May 8, 2016 - Web 862 730
0 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?
I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way. The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Why do URL with .html or index.php at the end are annoying to the search engine? I heard it can create some duplicate content but I have no idea why? Could someone explain me why is that so? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate content ramifications for country TLDs
We have a .com site here in the US that is ranking well for targeted phrases. The client is expanding its sales force into India and South Africa. They want to duplicate the site entirely, twice. Once for each country. I'm not well-versed in international SEO. Will this cause a duplicate content filter? Would google.co.in and google.co.za look at google.com's index for duplication? Thanks. Long time lurker, first time question poster.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alter_Imaging0