Removing large section of content with traffic, what is best de-indexing option?
-
If we are removing 100 old urls (archives of authors that no longer write for us), what is the best option?
-
we could 301 traffic to the main directory
-
de-index using no-index, follow
-
404 the pages
Thanks!
-
-
We have a busy blog with lots of very temporary content. About once a year we delete a couple thousand posts. However, before we do that we look at analytics to see which pages are pulling traffic from search.
For pages that receive regular traffic, we first try to recycle the post. If that is not possible we create a page with evergreen content so that a 301 redirect can be done. All other pages are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.
-
The best option would be to take the pages on a case-by-base basis.
Each page should ideally cover a specific focus. For example if an article discusses "the grapefruit diet" you can redirect the URL to another page on your site that discusses dieting. If you understand what users want from the page and have similar content, help your users make the connection they seek rather then 404'ing the page or dumping them on your home page.
If you do not have any similar content, check the page's backlinks. If there are none then I would let the page 404. This would be a good time to ensure your site's 404 page is helpful. A navigation bar and search option would be good to show on the page.
If the page has valuable backlinks and there is no related content on your site, perhaps the page still has value even though the author is gone. If you still wish to remove the page you should redirect the traffic to your home page or main directory as you suggested.
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
-
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How do I get the sub-domain traffic to count as sub-directory traffic without moving off of WordPress?
I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
To remove from index or not and stop words
Each product is an item of jewellery based on a letter of the alphabet. At present all 26 are indexed but as you guess they all share the same description, title and URL (apart from change in letter). What I was going to do was set all but one to no-index, recreate new descriptions and revert back to index. But then that got me thinking - through stop words will the titles be seen as duplicates: letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
What is the best approach for getting comments indexed, but also providing a great UX?
The way our in-house comments system was built, it uses AJAX to call comments as the page is loaded. I'm working on a set of requirements to convert the system over to be more SEO-friendly. Today, we have a "load more comments" after the first 20 comments, then it calls the server and loads more comments. This is what I'm trying to figure out. Should we load all the comments behind the scenes in the page, then lazy load the comments or use the same "load more" and just load what was already loaded behind the scenes? Or does anyone have a better suggestion about how to make the comments crawlable for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Traffic drop off and page isn't indexed
In the last couple weeks my impressiona and clicks have dropped off to about half what it used to be. I am wondering if Google is punishing me for something... I also added two new pages to my site in the first week of June and they still aren't indexed. In the past it seemed like new pages would be indexed in a couple days. Is there any way to tell if Google is unhappy with my site? WMT shows 3 server errors, 3 Access denied, and 122 not found errors. Could those not found pages be killing me? Thanks for any advise, Greg www.AntiqueBanknotes.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Homepage Content
I have a website which perform very well for some keywords and much less for other keywords. I would like to try to optimize the keywords with less performance. Let's say our website offers 2 main services: KEYWORD A and KEYWORD Z. KEYWORD Z is a very important keyword for us in terms of revenue. KEYWORD A gives us position Nr 1 on our local Google and redirect properly the visitors to xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php KEYWORD Z perform badly and gives us position Nr 7 on local Google search. 90% Google traffic is sent to xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php and the other 10% is sent to the home page of the website. The Homepage is a "soup" of all the services our company offers, some are important (KEYWORD Z) and other much less important. In order to optimize the keyword KEYWORD Z we were thinking to make a permanent redirect for xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php to xxxxxx.com and optimize the content of the Homepage to ONLY describe our KEYWORD Z. I am not sure if Google gives more importance in the content of the homepage or not. Of course links on the homepage to other pages like xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php will still exists. The point for us is maybe to optimize better the homepage and give more importance to the KEYWORD Z. Does it make sense or not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netbuilder0 -
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