Best Practice to Remove a Blog
-
Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered
Hi,
I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site.
I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are
1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant.
2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed.
Thoughts?
Thanks
PS
A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404
-
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***
In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.
By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.
-
I agree also. Thank you
As far as subdomain or subfolder, I see no difference. Can you explain Kane?
-
Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.
-
In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.
On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.
-
The blog has little value, with almost no user traffic.
It will be redesigned in a subdomain on the site.
I am only concerned with crawlers/google crawlers etc..and being penalized for tons of missing pages by 404'ing
There is nothing linking to the blog
-
A few other questions for you first:
- Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
- Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
- Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?
A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:
- No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
- No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).
-
Hiya,
Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:
I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.
You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.
The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.
How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.
Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?
If you decide to remove you content:
Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.
Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.
I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.
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
-
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
What is the best way to deal with an event calendar
I have an event calendar that has multiple repeating items into the future. They are classes that typically all have the same titles but will occasionally have different information. I don't know what is the best way to deal with them and am open to suggestions. Currently Moz anayltics is showing multiple errors (duplicate page titles, descriptions and overly dynamic urls). I'm assuming that it's showing duplicate elements way into the future. I thought of having the calendar no followed at all but the content for the classes seems valuable. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | categorycode0 -
Whats the best tool for a Sitemap creation?
Hi guys i like to know whats the best tool to create diferent types of Sitemap´s (images, videos, normals). I dont care if is paid.
Technical SEO | | faraujoj0 -
The best way to organize a gallery for SEO?
I need to redo the following gallery
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
http://goo.gl/PFvjE
because besides the fact that it looks ugly, it's an SEO mess. Since all the pages are comprised of images, and the only text is the navigation, I'm getting duplicate content issues. I tried adding a little paragraph of text on some of the pages, but this thing needs a total revamp. My main question is this: is that menu being repeated on all the pages really a good thing? What good is it to, say, on the fire patches page, to have a menu that includes all these keywords for sports patches? Would it be better to just have a main gallery page that lists the main patch types: applique, motorcycle, Scouting, ect, and then once you get to that page, list all the different sub categories?0 -
Too many links on your blog?
In all of my campaigns, I have a lot of URLs with too many links on the page (defined loosely as around or over 100 links per page); these links are virtually all found on blog pages. The link count shoots up quickly when you start using things like tag clouds, showing all the tags/categories a post is in, in addition to all the cross linking thats typical of blog posts. My question is: Does this matter? Do you work to get blog pages down under that 100 link limit, or just assume most blogs are like this and move along? If you think it does matter, what strategies have you used to cut down the number of links while still keeping popular elements like tag clouds?
Technical SEO | | AdoptionHelp0 -
Syndicating With Blogs
Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0
