What to do with 40 short articles to make room for 5 good thorough ones
-
Hello,
On my life coaching website, I have 40 articles that I want to replace with 5 good ones (to get up-to-date in modern content writing). The new articles will be long, thorough, and graphically stimulating.
What do I do with all these old short articles. There's no backlinks on them, but they are gaining a little traffic. I'm not sure I want them around since they're not high quality enough. What's normally done?
-
Thanks guys.
I guess I could delete them. If I did keep them where on a site do you put these old articles? I don't want an article section with 45 articles in it, I want one with 5 articles in it.
-
Ok, if you are confident that the 5 articles are good enough to cover those 40 articles which are not that great in quality, you can go ahead and delete them and then make a 301 redirection. However, if some of them are having good ranks, I would suggest retaining the article and making changes in the body content. Choice is yours.
-
Ok, so this is a bit confusing... you want to publish the same information in the 5 new articles that you have in the 40 short articles? If this is the case then idea is to 301 old articles to the new one so that you don’t lose traffic. There should be no debate about the link juice as you said there is no link pointing to those pages...
But if the information is different and the previous 40 short articles have different information then the 5 new once then in that case leave them as it is if they are not damaging the user experience because it will help you gain a little traffic but if you think there is absolutely no value in those pages and it might hurt the user experience in that case killing the pages is the best idea!
-
It would seem to me that if your 40 articles material is covered by the 5 good articles, then you might want to delete them if you are more concerned about maintaining a higher editorial level to attract/maintain customers..
But if you are more concerned with traffic content, is there any reason why you can't maintain all the articles using different keywords?
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
-
Google search returns blog homepage, but not article
When I do a google search for a specific article on our blog the search results only return the blog homepage with the article title shown in the meta description, but never the actual article page. I've tried to refine my search by using site: and quotation marks around the article title (e.g site:www.example.com "article title") but still only get the homepage. Our blog is showing up so I assume it's not an indexing issue, but not sure how to get the article pages to show on serps. Any ideas? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
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 -
I have lots of articles on my website. Should I add myself as the Author Rank for seo purposes
Hi All, We have lots of articles on our news page of our website. Should we add one of us as the author to gain Author Rank points so to speak ?.. Have not done anything previously with this but just wondered if we were missing a trick here thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Best way to move traffic/juice from one page to another?
I’ve got some pages that provide information on some companies in my website topic space, and also corresponding pages that allow users to rate and review those companies. So, for example: Company A information Company A reviews Company B information Company B reviews Google searches for “Company A” or “Company B” generally result in my information page ranking #2 behind the actual company’s website, and the reviews page ranking #3. (Probably not good to have two pages ranking for the same keyword in positions 2 and 3). The information pages do very well in Adsense while the review pages do not. The review pages have always had comments open for reviews, and I’ve just recently opened the information pages to comments. This has resulted in less of a need for the reviews pages as the comments on the Information pages are now serving the same purpose. I can even add a star rating to the information pages if I want so the review pages are completely unnecessary. So, I’d rather strengthen my information pages 1) to more solidify their rankings, and 2) get more visitors there than the review pages as they convert way better in Adsense. Question is, what is the best way to proceed? Option 1: remove internal linking to the review pages (I have sidebar links too), so less link juice just naturally goes to the review pages. On the review pages, direct people to click the link to the information page to go there instead. Eventually, the review pages will fall off the front page of the SERPs and people will just go to my #2 ranked company information page instead (and maybe #1 if I’m lucky, but doubt I’ll get ahead of the brand). Option 2: 301 Redirect the review pages to the information pages. Functionally, this would work well for me, but I fear that Google may not like it for some reason. My information pages are ranked so well that I do not want to risk them dropping. Are these fears unfounded? Is either of these two options better than the other, or does anyone have a better idea? Whatever I do, I don’t want those company information pages dropping from their #2 positions.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
One Company, Two Brands with Two Blogs, but One WP Panel for Blog?
I work with a company that has 2 brands. Both brands have separate sites (currently on a WP multisite install). We want each brand to have its own blog, but for ease of content creation have ONE wp install to create the blog content and depending on what category is clicked (Brand 1 and/or Brand 2), it will publish to that sites blog. 2 questions: 1. Is one WP install for blog syndication for 2 separate sites advisable (as client is requesting)? Or should we just bite the bullet and have each site have it's separate posting through it's own WP install? 2. Sometimes one blog post will be published to BOTH blogs (i.e. category Brand 1 and Brand 2 clicked OR if we use two separate wp installs for each site, publish to both blogs). Is using a rel=canonical for the original post (we need to decide which brand takes precedence) sufficient to overcome duplicate content problem? Thanks in advance! Stephan
On-Page Optimization | | stephanwb0 -
Elements of a Quality Article
In your opinion, what are the signals Google uses to judge the quality of an article or post? Here are some of my ideas: Reactions: Comment history Sharing (Twitter / FB / Social Bookmarks...etc) Citations / Mentions / Pingbacks Word count Content (Topical and qualitative analytsis, uniqueness) Domain (Qualitative analysis of domain article is published on) Use of images and media Use of references Timeliness (News, current affairs) Presence of date of publishing Spam filters: Anchor text usage Number, type and relation of outgoing links Content (Topical, semantic, qualitative analysis including keyword usage) Author data: Presence of author name Connection / link to author profile (hyperlink, rel tag, meta) Reputation of author (prior content, domains published and reactions) Looking forward to your contributions.
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Petrovic1 -
Several short articles, or one long one?
This may be a very basic question... In terms of the overall benefit to the SEO of a website, is it better to have, say, 4 pages about different aspects of the same subject (i.e. wooden lintels, steel lintels, concrete lintels and cavity lintels) or to have one page containing all the information? I have a site with roughly 250 pages, which could probably condense down to almost half that. The vast majority of inbound links point to either the homepage or one of the 20-odd most vistited pages. Of those, 2 or 3 pages count for roughly 70% of entrances. So should I concentrate on adding new pages, or improving/expanding the existing pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010 -
Anyone have any good strategies for keyword scalability?
As more pages are added to a site, what are some good strategies and tactics for ensuring that those pages are optimized based on keywords.
On-Page Optimization | | RiseInteractive780