Time To Throw In The Towel?
-
I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well.
Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms.
Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice?
Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away?
Thanks!
-
The redirect value is one link from another website.
-
About the only thing on these pages worth saving is their url. There's no content on them that is user relevant. The 8, altogether, have one link from another site. They get a total of about 60 visits a month... between all eight.They're old pages from some really bad seo articles that made little sense then and less now.
I have a couple of other pages I was thinking about doing this with, but also moving their text content to the homepage... to make the homepage a little deeper text-wise.
Any way that ditching pages around a shared subject could make Google think the whole thing is less relevant... even the surviving homepage?
It doesn't sound like you think much of the forwarding to the homepage thing for the link juice.
-
I rarely abandon pages. Instead I improve them. Before abandoning pages I would check to see if they have any external links and if they attract traffic from search. If they are useless pages then I would 301 redirect them. Will this help your SERPs? It might help slightly but it might not.
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
-
SEO implications of changing Date/Time format on website
Looking for some advice on an area that I can't seem to find much research about online. Since starting our website, it's always been hosted in the UK and targeting UK visitors. That means we always had the date/time format of the website as DD.MM.YY for example. We've now changed business focus and are targeting US visitors. We recently moved the site over to US hosting, and our web developers have instructed that we change to US date/time format (MM.DD.YY). My question is, are there any implications on doing this from an SEO perspective? Obviously, all our historic blog posts will need to have their date updated from, for example, 9 July to July 9. Does this make any difference at all? Anyone got any insights as to what best practice with this is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteratS20 -
Will "repurposing" a keyword on our website affect rankings gained over time?
Hi team! Thinking of "repurposing" a keyword on our website. Reason: when researching this particular keyword, GMS are quite high, however, the new content we're creating is more up to date, better in general, than the old content this keyword is attached to. How will this affect rankings we've gained over time? (i.e., will any "age" benefits gained as that keyword has been in use on our website for a few years, be lost?) Will Google see the keyword/URL as totally new because it's attached to new content/something that has gone live recently? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MariaPuche-Jimenez_Parker0 -
Is it a good strategy to link older content that was timely at one point to newer content that we would prefer to guide traffic and value to
Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato91 -
High resolution (retina) images vs load time
I have an ecommerce website and have a product slider with 3 images. Currently, I serve them at the native size when viewed on a desktop browser (374x374). I would like to serve them using retina image quality (748px). However how will this affect my ranking due to load time? Does Google take into account image load times even though these are done asynchronously? Also as its a slider, its only the first image which needs to load. Do the other images contribute at all to the page load time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5551 -
How do I get my Golf Tee Times pages to index?
I understand that Google does not want to index other search results pages, but we have a large amount of discount tee times that you can search for and they are displayed as helpful listing pages, not search results. Here is an example: http://www.activegolf.com/search-northern-california-tee-times?Date=8%2F21%2F2013&datePicker=8%2F21%2F2013&loc=San+Diego%2C+CA&coupon=&zipCode=&search= These pages are updated daily with the newest tee times. We don't exactly want every URL with every parameter indexed, but at least http://www.activegolf.com/search-northern-california-tee-times. It's weird because all of the tee times are viewable in the HTML and are not javascript. An example of similar pages would be Yelp, for example this page is indexed just fine - http://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=dogwalkers&find_loc=Lancaster%2C+MA I know ActiveGolf.com is not as powerful as Yelp but it's still strange that none of our tee times search pages are being indexed. Would appreciate any ideas out there!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CAndrew14.0 -
What is a "good" dwell time?
I know there isn't any official documentation from Google about exact number of seconds a user should spend on a site, but does anyone have any case studies that looks at what might be a good "dwell time" to shoot for? We're looking on integrating an exact time on site into or Google Analytics metrics to count as a 'non-bounce'--so, for example, if a user spends 45 seconds on an article, then, we wouldn't count it as a bounce, since the reader likely read through all the content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Having a hard time with duplicate page content
I'm having a hard time redirecting website.com/ to website.com The crawl report shows both versions as duplicate content. Here is my htaccess: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgman
RewriteBase /
#Rewrite bare to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.php$ http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L] I added the last 2 lines after seeing a Q&A here, but I don't think it has helped.0 -
Are there certain times of the day that it is better to update content or blogs? How do I find out what time is best for a particular site?
Trying to figure out how to best optimize timing of new content... including blogs and other on page content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronSchinke0