Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    5
    1006
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • netviper
      netviper last edited by

      So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out.  One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.  None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues.  Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better.

      So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts.

      What do you guys think?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • TakeshiYoung
        TakeshiYoung last edited by

        You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that:

        http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • BradyDCallahan
          BradyDCallahan last edited by

          It depends on what you mean by "remove."

          If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?

          Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.

          When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.

          Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).

          This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.

          To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."

          Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • EGOL
            EGOL last edited by

            we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.

            Wow.... it is great to hear someone looking at their content and deciding that he can kick it up a notch.  I have seen a lot of people would never, ever, pull the kill switch on an old blog post.  In fact they are still out there hiring people to write stuff that is really crappy.

            If this was my site I would first check to be sure that I don't have a penguin or unnatural links problem.  If you think you are OK there, here is what I would do.

            1. I would look at those blog posts to see if any of them have any traffic, link or revenue value.  Value is defined as... A) Traffic from any search engine or other quality source,  B) valuable links,  C) viewing by current website visitors,  D) traffic who enter through those pages making any income through ads or purchases.

            2. If any of them pass the value test above then I would improve that page.  I would put a nice amount of work into that page.

            3. Next I would look at each of those blog posts and see if any have content value.  That means an idea that could be developed into valuable content... or valuable content that could be simply rewritten to a higher standard.  Valuable content is defined as a topic that might pull traffic from search or be consumed by current site visitors.

            4. If any pass the valuable content test then I would improve them.  I would make them kickass.

            5. After you have done the above, I would pull the plug on everything else.... or if I was feeling charitable I would offer them to a competitor.  🙂

            Salutes to you for having the courage to clean some slates.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • Travis_Bailey
              Travis_Bailey last edited by

              I would run them through Copyscape to check for plagiarism/duplicate content issues. After that, I would check for referral traffic. If there are some pages that draw enough traffic, you might not want to remove them. Finally, round it off with a page level link audit. Majestic can give you a pretty good idea of where they stand.

              The pages that don't make the cut should be set to throw 410 status codes. If you still don't like the content on pages with good links and/or referral traffic, 301 those to better content on the same subject.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • NeatIT

                6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash

                i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
                folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
                without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
                RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
                RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
                RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
                RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
                RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
                RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
                RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
                2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
                3. Remove index.html
                4. Remove all .html
                5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
                0
              • ioannisa

                Mass Removal Request from Google Index

                Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website.  When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts.  This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012.  So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
                https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove.  Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404?  I believe this is very wrong.  As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
                https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
                http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
                0
              • ecerbone

                Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?

                I want to put blog on my site.  The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog).  I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website).   The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks.  That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone
                0
              • friendoffood

                Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing

                This search   -  site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
                https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
                Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'.  When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
                https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
                Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice.  Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls?  And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
                0
              • MedGroupMedia

                Removing index.php

                I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page.  I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all.  Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL?  I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php.  However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo.  All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links?  I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales.  I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file.  But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia
                0
              • BeytzNet

                How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?

                Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
                In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
                We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
                0
              • Tit

                What should be done with old news articles?

                Hello, We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-nameMy question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.thx

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit
                0
              • blacey

                Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog

                Hi All I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter. I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain. How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com. I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.