Migrate Old Archive Content?
-
Hi,
Our team has recently acquired several newsletter titles from a competitor.
We are currently deciding how to handle the archive content on their website which now belongs to us.
We are thinking of leaving the content on their site (so as not to suddenly remove a chunk of their website and harm them) but also replicating it on ours with a canoncial link to say our website is the original source.
The articles on their site go back as far as 2010.
Do you think it would help or hinder our site to have a lot of old archive content added to it? I'm thinking of content freshness issues.Even though the content is old some of it will still be interesting or relevant.
Or do you think the authority and extra traffic this content could bring in makes it worth migrating.
Any help gratefully received on the old content issue or the idea of using canonical links in this way.
Many Thanks
-
Thanks for all your help with this.
-
I agree 100% with Hutch and Patrick. Your best bet is to dive into whatever analytics data you have for the content. I would probably follow a rough procedure like:
- Identify content no one is looking at, is not ranking, is old/poor - start there and you can probably trim out the lowest quality stuff - remove completlely or just noindex to be more conservative
- Then find the other extreme - think 80/20 - find the obvious highest achievers and those are the ones you'd most want to maybe move over or maintain in some way. If any high achievers are getting traffic despite being old/poor - that won't last - so update them.
- The hardest to figure out is the mediocre performing stuff (moderate visits, moderate search visibility). I would probably put all the moderate content in a spreadsheet. Categorize it by topic. Figure out what can stand alone, or be consolidated. Basically you want to arrive at a situation where every piece of content you keep is, if not recent, at least still quality (quality as defined by: unique, well executed, good design, good UX, helpful or entertaining).
The content audit process mentioned by Patrick is a great way to do this analysis with data, but you can also just use some traffic and basic segmenting in analytics as an easier method.
You could also try some tools like URL Profiler, which cake make such an audit process a little easier.
That's just decided if you should keep it - when it comes to migrating I guess it depends on your ultimate vision for the company / branding.
I wouldn't try any tricky things like putting a canonical to say your site is the original source. Google probably knows this is not true, and a canonical is just a "suggestion" so there's no guarantee they will honor it. I would be more in favor of migrating it to your site, removing from the old with a 301 redirect to your site and maybe just a note on your site saying "this article originally appeared in ...." and be really transparent with the user.
-
Great answer, Hutch.
Building on that - Moz offers an extremely comprehensive content audit that goes step by step on how to evaluate your content.
No blanket answer - this will take time and research, but it will make your site so much better overall!
Good luck!
-
I think you are asking a large, loaded question. I do not think there is a "yes you should" or "no you should not" answer for your complex question.
This content is upwards of nearly half a decade old, is it still relevant? Instead of a blanket yes or no, I think you should go through all of it and see what is still valuable, depending on your industry it could be half of it, or it could be none, but you should be looking at each piece individually, not the entire site as one whole. For moving it, if the content is good I think placing it on your site (as I assume you want to consolidate) and redirecting to the new location is fine, plus if you do it as you go, you will not have a massive surge in your content, or drop in the old site but a gradual shift over a period of time.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
Sitemap For Static Content And Blog
We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site. We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year). But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones? I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
Content too buried in source code?
Our team is working on a refresh/redesign and am wondering if there's a quantifiable way of determining how high our meta data, H1 and paragraph should be in the source code. Or even whether I should be concerned with that. Our navigation will likely have dozens of links (we're going to keep it to under 100), and this doesn't even factor in the design elements. I am concerned about the content being buried. Are these the kind of concerns I should be having? Is there a measurable way to avoid it?
Technical SEO | | SSFCU0 -
Tips and duplicate content
Hello, we have a search site that offers tips to help with search/find. These tips are organized on the site in xml format with commas... of course the search parameters are duplicated in the xml so that we have a number of tips for each search parameter. For example if the parameter is "dining room" we might have 35 pieces of advice - all less than a tweet long. My question - will I be penalized for keyword stuffing - how can I avoid this?
Technical SEO | | acraigi0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0