Removing A Blog From Site...
-
Hi Everyone,
One of my clients I am doing marketing consulting for is a big law firm.
For the past 3 years they have been paying someone to write blog posts everyday in hopes of improving search traffic to site. The blog did indeed increase traffic to the site, but analyzing the stats, the firm generates no leads (via form or phone) from any of the search traffic that lands in the blog. Furthermore, I'm seeing Google send many search queries that people use to get to the site to blog pages, when it would be much more beneficial to have that traffic go to the main part of the website.
In short, the law firm's blog provides little to no value to end users and was written entirely for SEO purposes.
Now the law firm's website has 6,000 unique pages, and only 400 pages of the site are NON-blog pages (the good stuff, essentially).
About 35% of the site's total site traffic lands on the blog pages from search, but again... this traffic does not convert, has very high bounce rate and I doubt there is any branding benefit either.
With all that said, I didn't know if it would be best to delete the blog, redirect blog pages to some other page on the site, etc? The law firm has ceased writing new blog posts upon my recommendation, as well.
I am afraid of doing something ill-advised with the blog since it accounts now for 95% of the pages of the website. But again, it's useless drivel in my eyes that adds no value and was simply a misguided SEO effort from another marketer that heard blogs are good for SEO.
I would certainly appreciate any guidance or advice on how best to handle this situation.
Thank you for your kind help!
-
Regardless of whether the traffic converts, there's no harm to having non-converting traffic. If it generates links or social shares then it's adding value in that way. As long as the content itself doesn't suck, and reflects positively on the firm, then I would keep it.
There's probably a good argument to be made for reducing volume of blog content and devoting those resources to larger content pieces like whitepapers, downloadable guides, etc.
-
6000 pages sounds like improper pages are getting indexed, unless you have 6000 articles which i doubt.
I would block the /tag/ and /category/ and /2013/ type of folders. Yoast plugin will do that for you. Then you're down to just content. If the anchor texts are overdone that could hurt you and I would disable the incontent interlinking if it's overdone for SEO. Then you're left with compliant pages that won't hurt your site, and if it's content that is unique and not spun type of junk I would just leave it on the site since extra content on the site is a good thing, even if the blog posts aren't generating much traffic or ranking. It could be linked to less prominently on the site like in the footer so that less PR is getting passed to it and users aren't visiting it as much from the main pages. Users and PR is staying focused on the main 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
-
Improve Site Performance by Removing/Replacing Widgets & Plugins?
We completed a Wordpress redesign of our website in December. The project took about 8 months. Important URLs on the new site are performing slowly according to Google Page Speed Insights. For instance, a key product page gets a score of 18 on mobile and 61 on desktop. Home page scores 37 on mobile and 80 on desktop. My new SEO believes the website is hindered by an excessive number of plugins and widgets. That reducing the number of these may increase performance. Also, my developers were unable to get WT3 Total Cache to work with our InMotion server and have used about 3 plugins for cache. We purchased a real estate theme (wpcasa) and heavily customized it. Any suggestions for improveing performance? If we recoded the website from scratch without a pre existing theme (using the existing design) would that speed up performance? Is there anything we can do remove complexity and improve URL download speeds? We are in a very competitive niche and we need decent performance in order to rank. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Potential problems with my site
Dear Mozzers I hope you can help me with the following problems: My site is up and running for a year now and may be there has been problem with the homepage, because it ranks on first page for a competitive keyword on Google.com and Google.com.au only, however in other countries it just shows up as internal page and does not rank well. google.com/Google.com.au: homepage ranks top 10 (example.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
Other countries (.co.uk, .ca..ect) an internal page shows up, example.com/internalpage.html - shows on page 3-4. I can not find the homepage of example.com anywhere around top 1000. Can you please tell me what are the potential problems. Thank you very much. BR/Tran0 -
How do I get the best from our Blog and build quality links and drive traffic to our site?
We have recently setup a Wordpress focused blog (blog.towelsrus.co.uk) which is very much work in progress. Because of financial constraints we had to host this on a separate sub domain. I need to get to grips with blogs is new to me (only been doing SEO this for 3 months now) and have have read may posts on the forums here that this is one of the best ways to build links and engage the audience. How do I go about getting people to read my blog, and should I use this to pull in traffic on keywords we cannot through the main site or should i use this to re-enforce and build traction on those keywords we are trying to rank for on the main site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Blog posts, blog archives and duplication
Just reviewed a blog integrated with my website, and have noticed duplicate content - the blog homepage includes blogpost summaries (not a major issue as now set up so only put in opening paragraphy then anchor text to full blog post). Then that's a full blog blog post if you click for more - then that's carbon copied over in the archive. So one near exact duplicate. Is this something worth taking action on with nocrawl tags, etc., on archive duplicates of blog posts, or shouldn't I be to hung-up on this? I'm a scientist by training, so tend to go further and further once I get going...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Backlinks from Chinese Big sites
Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adresanet0 -
When is it worth re-structuring your site?
I recently started working on a site that is 8 years old and the currently URLs/ site structure is not SEO friendly. We are concerned that in re-structuring the site, we may loose our rankings. Has anyone ever completely re-structured their site? Was it worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0