What to do with large number of old/outdated pages?
-
Are we redoing a large portion of our site (not ecommerce). We have a large number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most).
What should I do with those pages?
Could you give any guidance on whether we should or what affect it might have one the rest of the website if we delete those pages or simply 301 redirecting all those pages to the home page?
-
I would perform an 80/20 analysis and see if these pages are driving any traffic to your website. If they aren't performing well, I would delete them and redirect them to similar pages or back to the homepage.
I agree with Bernadette about checking Open Site Explorer. You want to makes sure you are not going to be giving up any valuable backlinks that these pages might have generated.
-
Thank you, I looked at the past year and they are not getting traffic. Spot checking these pages using Open Site Explorer also doesn't show external links to those pages.
My concern is that since these pages represent over 2/3 of our total indexed pages - if we just get rid of them (whether 301, 404, 410 or a combination) Would that negatively affect the remaining pages?
-
The first thing I would do is look at Google Analytics for the past year (or more) to see if those pages have any traffic. You've mentioned that you looked at that, but didn't say how long of a time it was.
Typically, we do recommend redirecting those pages to the most appropriate current page on the website. If those pages don't have anything to do with what you're current selling or offering, then you might want to simply server up a 404 error (ideally a 410 gone error).
I would also look at the links, such as by using Open Site Explorer or Majestic.com to make sure there aren't any external sites linking to those pages. If there are external links to certain pages, you'll want to redirect them.
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
-
Page auto directing to /#/id0 but no 301 in place?
I'm a little perplexed and hope someone technically savvy can help. Wordpress site. Our page: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation Redirects to: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation/#/id0 I cannot see any reason for this. No 301s, nothing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
PR Dilution and Number of Pages Indexed
Hi Mozzers, My client is really pushing for me to get thousands, if not millions of pages indexed through the use of long-tail keywords. I know that I can probably get quite a few of them into Google, but will this dilute the PR on my site? These pages would be worthwhile in that if anyone actually visits them, there is a solid chance they will convert to a lead do to the nature of the long-tail keywords. My suggestion is to run all the keywords for these thousands of pages through adwords to check the number of queries and only create pages for the ones which actually receive searches. What do you guys think? I know that the content needs to have value and can't be scraped/low-quality and pulling these pages out of my butt won't end well, but I need solid evidence to make a case either for or against it to my clients.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.
I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as: http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/ will come up as duplicate if they are both live... I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page. We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist. The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server. We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index The links are showing 200 OK. We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. What is the best way to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10