Removing A Blog From Site...

[gbkevin]

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!

[KaneJamison]

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.

[irvingw]

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.