What do you do with outdated news and articles?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 This traffic is usually related to the topic but not to the out-of-date event.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
-
One Article, Multiple(Same Keyword) Anchors, Same Urls
Hey Folks, So I have a 1000 word articles talking about say Dubai Holiday. Is it okay to have 4-5 Dubai Holiday as anchor linked to the same page. Or it should be only be used once.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SAISEO0 -
Google News Sitemap creating service
Hi All, I am dealing with google news sitemap. My technical guy don't know how to create a site for google news. Do you know which service or company can help me with this? Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Deleting Outdated News Pages??
Hi everyone, I'm currently doing a full content audit for my company, in preparation for a website redesign. I've discovered thousands of pages (dating all the way back to 2009) with thin, outdated, and irrelevant content. ie: real estate news and predictions that are now super old news. According to analytics, these older pages aren't receiving any traffic, so I think the best course of action is to delete these pages & add 404 redirects. In my opinion, this should be a big priority, because these pages are likely already hurting our domain authority to some extent & it's just a matter of time before we're really penalized by Google. Some members of my team have a different opinion -- they worry that deleting 1000 pages could hurt our rankings, and they want to wait and discuss the issue further in 3Q or 4Q (once the site redesign is completed and we have time to focus on it). Am I wrong to think that waiting is a very bad idea? Google will notice that we've done a major site redesign--we've written all new copy, optimized the UX & content organization to make info easier to find, created new lead magnets, optimized images, etc.-- but we didn't bother to update 1000 pages of outdated content that no one is looking at...won't that look bad? Do you agree that we should delete/merge all outdated content now, rather than waiting until after the site redesign? Or am I overreacting? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCon7110 -
Meta refresh for news site?
We have a news site that uses a meta refresh (<meta < span="">http-equiv="refresh" content="600" /> across all content. I understand the reasoning on the homepage and am trying to decide of the cons of using this (slows page, is it treated differently and loses pagerank/link ..) Does anyone have experience with meta refresh being a negative thing or does it no longer matter?</meta <>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristieWahlquist0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
What do you think of this post? An ordered article or not???
Hi, Just encountered the following article on Digital Trends: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/lg-z-rumored/ This is a huge and respected site. Notice, that whenever the word "smartphone" or "smartphones" is mentioned, there is a link to Sprint. Needless to say that Sprint has nothing to do directly with the article's subject (a new LG smartphone that may be coming soon). So, is this an ordered piece? Is this legit? Does it assist Sprint with the article that is not really related? Should I pursue these type of articles (links) for my site or only HUGE companies can get away with it? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Rel=author, google plus, picture in Article page SERP
Hello, Could someone explain the easiest way to use Google Plus and rel="author" to claim our articles written by us and get our picture beside them in the Google SERPS site: nlpca(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
SEOMOZ found basically all my articles and says they need a 301 redirect ?
Hope someone can HELP. So my site looks like it has the proper 301 redirect to www. for the main domain. But for some reason my articles that have a /trackback on them redirect to same address with out the trackback at the end. How do i fix this? seomoz is saying all my articles need a 301 redirect .all like 100. Thanks any help would be great
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jstgobig0