What do you do with outdated news and articles?
-
What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles?
Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons?
It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it?
How say you?
Update:
I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?
-
If you have thousands of articles that are not pulling search traffic, dropping them from your site allows the PR that's trapped in those pages to flow into the rest of the site.
-
Great question, Doug.
We file the news blurbs into folders by date (year or month). When we abandon a folder we place an .htaccess file in that folder with specific redirects as the first few lines and then a wildcard redirect as last line.
Looks like this....
Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-1.shtml http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-1.html
Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-2.shtml http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-2.html
redirectMatch 301 ^/blog/2010/ http://mysite.com/blog/ -
EGOL, how do you manage the redirects when you've got so many?
-
Amongst all my commercial sites I have a site related to politics. In this instance I receive traffic to links that may date back to 2001 because the "long tail" of the post title relates to what a visitor searched for.
If your sites has content that may have historical value to someone it then continues to add value as content IMHO.
I'm amazed when I see traffic to a very old post or related comments.
-
We put out at least a thousand very short news blurbs per year. These are mostly for events that have almost no value to visitors a few months later. (Visitors bounce off hard)
About once a year we run analytics on these pages to find out which ones are pulling traffic. This traffic is usually related to the topic but not to the out-of-date event. Where we have nice traffic coming in we look for a similar current topic, write a short story and redirect the old URL to the new one.
Any pages that do not have nice traffic are deleted and redirected to the blog homepage. Some of these deleted pages have links so that value is passed to the homepage - which faces competition.
In my opinion, having lots of pages on your site that are not pulling in traffic and have no value to visitors is like dead weight. You will ride higher in the water and sail faster if you toss them overboard.
-
personally i will never delete and article even if there isn't any links pointing to it.
what i will do sometimes its built links to this articles to make the article page stronger and in overall your site stronger , just a suggestion...
it's good , it's content why delete it.,
hope that help you
Mike
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
-
Does Google penalise in the way described in this article?
In an interesting article from January on content cannibalisation: https://ninjaoutreach.com/content-cannibalization-avoid/ there is the following paragraph: "When the same keyword is used across a number of pages of a single website, Google’s spiders automatically get directed to a page with low-grade quality which in turn results in the low ranking of all the pages on the website." Is this true? The suggestion here is that they automatically get directed there as a form of penalty. This seems like quite an extraordinary claim! Can anyone verify?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank0 -
Duplicate URL Parameters for Blog Articles
Hi there, I'm working on a site which is using parameter URLs for category pages that list blog articles. The content on these pages constantly change as new posts are frequently added, the category maybe for 'Heath Articles' and list 10 blog posts (snippets from the blog). The URL could appear like so with filtering: www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016 www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=1 All pages currently have the same Meta title and descriptions due to limitations with the CMS, they are also not in our xml sitemap I don't believe we should be focusing on ranking for these pages as the content on here are from blog posts (which we do want to rank for on the individual post) but there are 3000 duplicates and they need to be fixed. Below are the options we have so far: Canonical URLs Have all parameter pages within the category canonicalize to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general and generate dynamic page titles (I know its a good idea to use parameter pages in canonical URLs). WMT Parameter tool Tell Google all extra parameter tags belong to the main pages (e.g. www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=3 belongs to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general). Noindex Remove all the blog category pages, I don't know how Google would react if we were to remove 3000 pages from our index (we have roughly 1700 unique pages) We are very limited with what we can do to these pages, if anyone has any feedback suggestions it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xtend-Life0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
What are the ranking factors for "Google News"? How can we compete?
We have a few sport news websites that are picked up by Google News. Once in a blue moon, one of our articles ranks for a great keyword and shows in one of the 3 listings that Google News has in SERPS. Any tips on how we can we optimise more of our articles to compete in these 3 positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betnl0 -
Should We Link To Our News?
We just started an "In the News" section on our webpage. We are not sure what would be the best for SEO purposes. Should we link to the news websites that have the stories about our company, even if they have no link bank? Or should we just take screenshots of the news article and only link to articles that link back to us (this is what we a currently doing)? Here is our news page, http://www.buyautoparts.com/News/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebuilder0 -
Client Can't Write His Own Articles
Hello, I'm helping a client put together an FAQ and 5 thorough, graphically stimulating, articles. The client can easily write his FAQ articles. However, he's not knowledgeable enough to write the 5 thorough articles, and hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money. Should we have a writer put together an outline or rough draft and present that to the expert for editing? The client can afford that. Or what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW1 -
Article Marketing For Link Building
Just wanted to get a discussion going about the effectiveness of article marketing for building links. All of my content will be decent and unique. I will submit to the following 10 directories: Ezine Buzzle Goarticles Article Dashboard Sooperarticles Helium Articlebase Articlealley Isnare Article City Of course, varied anchor text and relevant content to my various niches. I just want to know if this is still an effective link building strategy. Please don't recommend i "try" something else because i am doing everything else as well. Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
How to beat Wikipedia article from the top spot on SERPS?
Hi Guys, One of our clients has a good web site with lots of content that is ranked already on #2 for the top keyword (singular and plural) on Google UK. The keyword itself is a competitive one. The top spot is occupied by a wikipedia article that doesn't have much content in general. Can anyone come up with an advice what strategy we have to apply to outplace that article? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | myclicks-1636030