How do you archive content?
-
In this video from Google Webmasters about content, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s6Y4mx9Vw around 0:57 it is advised to "archive any content that is no longer relevant".
My question is how do you exactly do that? By adding noindex to those pages, by removing all internal links to that page, by completely removing those from the website?
How do you technically archive content?
-
Hard to say what is meant by that video. Often, Google is purposely vague.
If the content is truly no longer relevant, I would 301 it to more relevant URLs on a page by page basis. This will remove low performing pages from Google's index, and potentially improve your rankings.
On the other hand, if the content still has value but doesn't need to be front and center, a clearly organized archive based on date or some other organizational method should work fine.
-
Hi Sorina,
Archiving is more about classifying information/content that is either outdated or not being accessed that frequently by the visitors into a separate section on your site. I would not no index those pages because they might be ranking well in the search engines and still be getting traffic to the site. You can do this creating an "archives" section on your site so that if the visitors want to access the old content on your site they can still do so by accessing that section.
Here is a useful post on archiving content on your site
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
-
SEO value of article title content?
I work for an online theater news publisher. Our article page titles include various pieces of data: the title, publication date, article category, and our domain name (theatermania.com). Are all of these valuable from an SEO standpoint? My sense it'd be cleaner to just show the title (and nothing more) on a SERP. But we'll certainly keep whatever helps us with rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
How to best handle expired content?
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this? Here are a few examples. With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year? Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Product pages content
Hi! I'm doing some SEO work for a new client. I've been tasked with boosting some of their products, such as http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/self-propelled-rear-roller-rotary-petrol-lawnmowers/honda-hrx426qx. It's currently #48 for the term Honda Izy HRG465SD, while http://www.justlawnmowers.co.uk/lawnmowers/honda-izy-hrg-465-sd.htm is #2, behind Amazon. Regarding links, there's no great shakes between the pages or even the domains. However, there's major difference in content. I'm happy to completely revamp it, I just wanted to check I'm not missing anything out before starting to rewrite it altogether! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Duplicate Content Error because of passed through variables
Hi everyone... When getting our weekly crawl of our site from SEOMoz, we are getting errors for duplicate content. We generate pages dynamically based on variables we carry through the URL's, like: http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp
http://www.example123.com/fun/life/1084.php?top=true ie, ?top=true is the variable being passed through. We are a large site (approx 7000 pages) so obviously we are getting many of these duplicate content errors in the SEOMoz report. Question: Are the search engines also penalizing for duplicate content based on variables being passed through? Thanks!0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Nuanced duplicate content problem.
Hi guys, I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something. Situation: The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B. Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance. Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword. Plan: New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so... Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naymark.biz0 -
Mobile version creating duplicate content
Hi We have a mobile site which is a subfolder within our site. Therefore our desktop site is www.mysite.com and the mobile version is www.mysite.com/m/. All URL's for specific pages are the same with the exception of /m/ in them for the mobile version. The mobile version has the specific user agent detection capabilities. I never saw this as being duplicate content initially as I did some research and found the following links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterkn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k
http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022109.html What I am finding now is that when I look into Google Webmaster Tools, Google shows that there are 2 pages with the same Page title and therefore Im concerned if Google sees this as duplicate content. The reason why the page title and meta description is the same is simply because the content on the 2 verrsions are the exact same. Only layout changes due to handheld specific browsing. Are there any speficific precausions I could take or best practices to ensure that Google does not see the mobile pages as duplicates of the desktop pages Does anyone know solid best practices to achieve maximum results for running an idential mobile version of your main site?1