What do you do with old web pages?
-
I have a wordpress blog that I've made a ton of changes to. I have about a dozen pages on it that have old information or I no longer have a use for. In retrospect, I probably should have used the old pages for new content instead of building new pages. Should I just leave them on the site with no links to them, should I mark them as noindex, or should I delete them? I think some of the old pages could be completing with my new pages for ranking due to similar content.
Website is: http://continuumweddings.com if you'd like to check out my site.
Thanks,
Melissa
-
Not sure what you meant by " wont be wasting any content,"
A 301 redirect will only redirect incomming links to the new page, the content value of the old page or any inherent authority it had will not be passed.
It will no lnger exist, only the incomming links will exist and can be redirected
-
Thanks! I actually have a Pinterest buttom in the menu and link to it at the end of all my blog entries. I'm obsessed with Pinterest but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to use it for my business.
-
Casey is correct.
If you already have written new pages, there's no need to update the old ones. Redirect them 301 to the most consistent new page you have.
Anyway, in the future, try to consider to use one of tips I suggested in one my last comment in the SEOmoz blog: you can read them here > http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday#jtc165757
Psst... I've seen the site and, sincerely, it is one of the best sites about wedding photography I've seen so far. Just a suggestion: being the photos so important both in the site and the blog, I warmly suggest you to add the Pinterest button to your site and to partecipate in Pinterest as I truly believe that it is the social network perfect for a business like yours.
-
I second that! It would have been best to update the old pages.
-
The best thing to do would be to update those pages with new & fresh content. But if you have already made new pages which are out ranking and competing with your old pages you can do a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages. This way you wont be wasting any content, and any authority the old pages had will be passed along to the new pages.
Since your using WordPress you can use Simple 301 Redirects Plugin to make it easier.
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 Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
Unique Pages with Thin Content vs. One Page with Lots of Content
Is there anyone who can give me a definitive answer on which of the following situations is preferable from an SEO standpoint for the services section of a website? 1. Many unique and targeted service pages with the primary keyword in the URL, Title tag and H1 - but with the tradeoff of having thin content on the page (i.e. 100 words of content or less). 2. One large service page listing all services in the content. Primary keyword for URL, title tag and H1 would be something like "(company name) services" and each service would be in the H2 title. In this case, there is lots of content on the page. Yes, the ideal situation would be to beef up content for each unique pages, but we have found that this isn't always an option based on the amount of time a client has dedicated to a project.
On-Page Optimization | | RCDesign741 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Autogenerated pages
My main product is database conversion software. As it supports tons of databases, it's fairly easy to generate thousands of landing pages simply by variating source/target database names, connection information etc. In fact, I autogenerated almost 25k pages that way. As I didn't want to jeopardize my main site, I placed all that content to a new microsite (www.fullconvert.com) which had no history and no inbound links. Results were nice - site is live two months and in second month already had 1300 visitors. Now, my question is - should I create the same thing on my (old and rather authoritative) main site www.spectralcore.com? I could use a different template to avoid duplicate content. Of course, my main concern is being penalized by Google. In my opinion, this autogenerated content is fine because it provides (tons of) laser-focused landing pages, so visitors will instantly recognize they found what they're looking for. But Google might disagree! What do you think? Is there a danger in trying to leverage authority of my main site in adding 20k+ autogenerated pages with inbound no links to them?
On-Page Optimization | | metadata0 -
Why are some of page indexed and others not
I have created a site structure like this: domain/for-sale/brand domain/for-sale/brand-model domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg3 etc.... I cannot understand why the domain/for-sale/brand-model does not seem to be indexed, yet the domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg6 is? This is a new site, but I cannot understand why this URL would be indexed without the others... Any ideas? My home pages has links to the domain/for-sale/brand, this page has links to domain/for-sale/brand-model1, domain/for-sale/brand-model2 etc, each of these pages have links to domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1, domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 etc...
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0 -
Duplicate page content,
Hi, in my campaign crawls diagnostic, I have a lot of Duplicate page content, but we use canonicalization and I used webmastertool to make sure the campaign parameters are not consider by the Google bot. Can you see what could be my problem, or do you have a tip for me or things to look at ? Thank You VB
On-Page Optimization | | Vale70 -
Page Indexing
Hello All Nice easy question! I've made some on page changes to page titles, content, H1s etc but wanted to know if there was a way to check if Google has reindexed the page since the changes were made? I appreciate the different factors that will help improve your crawl rate like new content, external links, domain authority etc. I made these changes around 2 weeks ago. Google has cached the pages since I made the changes but not picked up on the new page titles in the search results. Cheers Todd
On-Page Optimization | | todd75850 -
Why isn't SEOMoz using File Extensions (*.html etc) on any of their web page URLs?
...and what is the SEO benefit of this? This video from Matt Cutts suggests using file extentions, except for a directory.
On-Page Optimization | | magicrob0