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
-
Use of "/" and using fractions in titles
We are a company that sells pipe and fittings. An example of a part that someone will search for is : 3/4" PVC Socket I am not sure how best to represent the fraction in the title of the page that has such a product. I am concerned that if I use the forward slash it will be misinterpreted by search engines (although it will be interpreted properly by users). A lot of folk search for the product by the fraction size and so it would be good to be able to represent it in the title, but I don't want to get "punished" by confusing search engines. I could replace the forward slash with a hyphen or pipe symbol, but then may look a bit weird to our users... Any recommendations? Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobBawden11 -
Visibility for https://goo.gl/gJH7eh
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if anyone can help me with the following. At the start of May this year we really lost visibility for the homepage of this site https://goo.gl/gJH7eh. This was particularly noticeable by tracking rankings for the term 'oak furniture'. We previously ranked on page 1 for the term 'oak furniture', but since May the homepage has struggled to make the top 100 positions for this term. We're confident that we have done everything within Google's guidelines, but it seems something is really holding the homepage back. The site ranks on page 1 for 'oak furniture' on Bing. The site had previously had a manual penalty for unnatural links (warning received several years ago). These links had a particular emphasis on using the anchor text 'oak furniture'. When we took over the site we did an extensive link clean up and disavow and managed to get the penalty removed at the end of October 2013. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OFS0 -
Looking for an experienced SEO/SEM contractor
I'm looking to hire an SEO/SEM contractor for about 10 hours a week to work with me at Infer. Will need some help re-architecting our AdWords and continue inbound and SEO optimization of our website. Martech experience a +, Wordpress dev skills ++ Send me a PM if interested.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanzinsmeister0 -
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Can I add Title/Description tags to site map
I have started working on a website that it written in JAVA. It has 26 URL's But because of the way it is written it is all shown on the home page code and does not have the ability to add unique title and description tags. Is there a work around for SEO on websites like this aside from adding content? I was wondering if there is a way to submit a sitemat with title and description tags. Any advice? Chris.K
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Multiple, Partial Redirecting URLs from old SEO company
Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000. Come to find out this was a result of their former agency. The business is very local central. I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state. Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain. You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain. However, there are pages on the additional domains that do not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect. Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50. Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well). There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings. What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeverSEO0 -
What would you pick? Species/Breed or Topic
If you'd like to take a look, the site under quesiton is http://ArkAnimals.Com. At the moment I am considering doing landing pages by topics and not by the type of animals. I will be blending both wild and domestic animals but how to best do this is confusing since so much has changed over the years. My competitors are focusing on animal types mainly and competition is fierce. Also the site attracts by three main topics not specific animals--so I want to be a bit unique which is why I am considering a topic driven focus. What would you recommend? Background This site has been online since 1994 and on its own domain for a long while. However, over time it has suffered from a lot of things--different designers, expansion, movement of content to niche sites and bad seo. LOL Once everything was on one site with sub directories. Then, it expanded and my online advisors recommended moving topics off into their own niche sites. So, I did that. Ugh. Now, much of that content is being integrated back as I am undergoing an intense revamp (the last one was a disaster). There are a few presenting problems that I could use your perspective and expertise--since I am too close to it. Problems for Needing Your Input The site is over 2600 pages with many in html and others in php.What is the best practice? Moving the remaining html pages over into php? Some of the pages that were not active have a redirect to the blog. I plan on doing page to page 301 redirects once I dig in--unless you have a better idea. There are a lot of well established links to some of the pages. How many topics are too many? I have a wide variety of content. First, the magazine format covered about six topics. Later, I began covering more pet related items and did a lot of different news summaries to keep it fresh. I want to dump the short outdated pages as many of them have obsolete links or are too short to add any value. Or should I update if they help with the seo rather than continue to let them dilute the site? Landing page or blog? Which is better, an index landing page or blog? At the moment the blog appears on the main index for freshness and the site attracts traffic for specific topics not animal breeds or species. I want to move the site from an educational site to serving as a main funnel for potential clients driving them to get on a list or to a niche site for sales related to the particular topic/training of interest. What your take on this if you were to tackle it? Any input would be greatly appreciated. My audience includes those who are pet owners, novice trainers, and animal lovers with no critter sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheARKlady0 -
Should I 301 Redirect Old Pages to Newer Ones?
I know there is value having lots of unique content on our websites, but I'm wondering how long it should be kept for, and if there is any value in 301 redirecting it? So, for example we have a number of pages on our website that are dedicated to single products (blue widget x, blue widget y, red widget x, red widget y). Nice unique content, with some (but not many) links. These products are no longer available though and have been replaced. So I'm faced with three choices: 1. Leave it as it is, and hope it adds to the overall site authority (by value of being another page), and also perhaps mop up a few longer tail keywords. Add a link to the replacement product on these pages; 2. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products to give these a bit of a boost, and lose the content; 3. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products and move all the old content to a new 'blue widgets archive' and 'red widgets archive' page? Would appreciate everyones thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0