Delete or not delete old/unanswered forum threads?
-
Hello everyone,
here is another question for you: I have several forum postings on my websites that are pretty old and so they are sort of "dead discussion" threads. Some of those old discussion threads are still getting good views (but not new postings), and so I presume may be valuable for some users. But most of them are just answers to personal questions that I doubt someone else could be interested in. Besides that, many postings are just single, unanswered questions still waiting for an answer, forgotten, they are just sitting there, and will probably stay unanswered for years.... I don't think this may be good for SEO, am I right? How do you suggest to approach this kind of issues on forums or discussions sections on a website?
I am eager to know your thoughts on all this. Thank you in advance!
All the best,
Fab.
-
Thank you very much guys for your answers, tips and insights! I will move accordingly...
-
A quick fix might be to move them to an area of your forum you have to be logged into see, it normally wont be able to get crawled then and shouldn't rank up but it would also be available for your forum users to use.
Good luck!
-
With regards to having lots of old unanswered posts that are of low quality, it will affect your SEO as I see it as "diluting" other strong content you may have in other threads. However, before deciding to delete them, you should look through each of them and judge if they are really of no value (e.g. spam posts).
Answered posts with useful information should definitely be kept. As for unanswered posts, if the question is still relevant and worth answering in your opinion, you can perhaps "bump" it up and recommend forummers to reply. It would be a waste to delete thoughtful questions. This way, you can tap on your old content to generate more discussions within your forum.
Hope that helps!
-
Are these FORUM posts/page URL's part of the primary root domain? Are they in a separate FOLDER or DIR within the ROOT of the site? How is it structured? Are they still being crawled and indexed? Are they still indexed?
My bet is that you could map out these old post/URL's and possibly 301 them to more relevant information on your site, that deals with, or discusses the topic at hand. You don't want to flat out remove them, have a pile of 404 error's show up and then have to worry about salvaging the damage later. Map out the pages you want to dump - see if there is relevant more up to date conversations that are within the same topic and 301 redirect them to those locations.
You might want to considering removing the one's you can't 301 to more up to date relevant information, if there is no page to do so. You could map these out and possibly create content on the site or BLOG that answers the forum's post, but that might take time and money? That way, future people would find information to handle that very question and not be posting a question about it in the Forum
Unfortunately, in my experience, FORUM's have this issue and I think will continue to have this issue. There is no once recipe to fix the problem of outdated forum posts, or outdated URL's - but you can leverage some of that and turn it back into traffic for the site - and traffic that is still valuable if it has a purposes (redirect). If not - you can remove the old URL's/posts, let them 404 and remove them through GWMT systematically as they begin to populate your crawl reports from Google.
Either way, it's an option to look at to clean up the site and site pages/depth if you feel those pages have little to offer UX or visiting customers Remember, Google has confirmed that pages that hurt your overall site score, can pull down your natural rankings in the SERP's if pages that are of low-quality don't help the site, users or the user/customer-visitor experience.
Hope that helps a little! Cheers
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
-
How long should you leave keywords on your site related to your old brand?
We rebranded our organization 2 years ago. We decided to leave some of our archived content with our old name because it was already serving link juice to the website. How long should you leave keywords like that on your site related to an old brand?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdaily0 -
Glossary/Terms Page - What is the best way?
We have a glossary section on our website with hundreds of terms. At the moment we have it split into letters, e.g. there one page with all the terms starting with A, another for B etc.. I am conscious that this is not the best way to do things as not all of these pages are being indexed, and the traffic we get to these pages is very low. Any suggestions on what would be the best way to improve this? The 2 ideas I have at the moment are Have every term on a separate page, but ensuring there is enough copy for that term Leave as is, but have the URL change once a user scrolls down the page. E.g. the first page would be www.website.com/glossary/a/term-1 then once the user scrolls past this terms and onto the next one the URL would change to www.website.com/glossary/a/term-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Page / Domain Authority Question
If my website were to purchase a sponsored article on a site with a powerful domain authority that contained a do-follow link, and the link would be "domain.com/articles/new-article" ... obviously new-article would have 0 page authority, being new... is that still considered a valuable link and why or why not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cat5com0 -
GTM Migration from Old to New Verison as Old Version closing on 1st April
Hi Guys, Can you please tell me is it a correct configuration for tracking thank you page? In Old Version of Tag Manager - GA conversion Tracking, tag type - universal analytic, web property id - UA-12345678-9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devdan
track type - transaction, Firing rule -{{url}} contains ordersuccessful.aspx, {{event}} equals gtm.dom In New Version of Tag Manager - Choose Product - Google Analytic, choose tag type - universal analytic, configure tag - tracking id - UA-12345678-9, track type - transaction, Fire on -Name - order successful page, type - custom event, Filter- Page url contains ordersuccessful.aspx, event equals gtm.dom If i remove event equals gtm.dom will tag fire and transaction details will reflect in google analytic? I am doing Manually configuration in new version of GTM as i have only few tags so just want to know if all tags successfully configured & I placed new GTM code on my website then google analytic will start reflecting data at same moment right, it will not take 24 hours right? Thanks! Dev0 -
Domain.com/keyword1.keyword2.html vs doamin.com/keyword1-keyword2.html
I was doing some research and saw this url structure in a website that was not ranking well and can't help but wonder was the url structure part of the problem as well it looks like this with a period between keywords. domain.com/keyword1.keyword2.html and was wondering if that is acceptable for search engines as opposed to the normal dashes like this expample ... domain.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html I have never noticed a period to separate words in a url before. Anyone have any experience with this ? Is this going to hurt possible rankings ? Thank you in advance, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane91 -
Custom Google Search & Joomla/Wordpress
If you install google custom search on a site - does it record a list of all the searches people type into the search box? Is there a Joomla & Wordpress Search plugin/extension that keeps a track of the search history used on your site(s).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0