Time To Throw In The Towel?
-
I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well.
Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms.
Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice?
Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away?
Thanks!
-
The redirect value is one link from another website.
-
About the only thing on these pages worth saving is their url. There's no content on them that is user relevant. The 8, altogether, have one link from another site. They get a total of about 60 visits a month... between all eight.They're old pages from some really bad seo articles that made little sense then and less now.
I have a couple of other pages I was thinking about doing this with, but also moving their text content to the homepage... to make the homepage a little deeper text-wise.
Any way that ditching pages around a shared subject could make Google think the whole thing is less relevant... even the surviving homepage?
It doesn't sound like you think much of the forwarding to the homepage thing for the link juice.
-
I rarely abandon pages. Instead I improve them. Before abandoning pages I would check to see if they have any external links and if they attract traffic from search. If they are useless pages then I would 301 redirect them. Will this help your SERPs? It might help slightly but it might not.
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
-
Google has penalized me for a keyword,and removed from google some one know for how long time is the penalty
i have by some links from fiverr i was ranking 9 for this keyword with 1200 of searches after fiverr it has disappeared from google more then 10 days i guess this is a penalty someone know how long a penalty like this is how many days to months ? i don't get any messages in webmaster tools this is the gig https://www.fiverr.com/carissa30/do-20-unique-domains-high-tf-and-cf-flow-backlinks-high-da?source=Order+page+gig+link&funnel=a7b5fa4f-8c0a-4c3e-98a3-74112b658c7f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexmuller870 -
Meta-description not used at all times
Hi all We are marketing an e-commerce site and seem to have a weird issue. For some reason the clearly specified meta description is not being used in the SERPs. Had a look in the source but all tags seems to be there. The site can be found here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify
www.bangerhead.se A sample search in Google that uses the wrong info in the SERP:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSE548SE548&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bangerhead Any ideas to why this is? Grateful for any inputHave a nice day Fredrik0 -
I'm having an exteremly hard time with SERPs despite my best efforts. Can someone help?
My site is www.drupalgeeks.org Our traffic is going up but our SERPS are not. We simply don't rank for any of our targeted keywords. I have covered nearly every white hat SEO strategy possible. Our site has a great social presence (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), we write blogs regularly, and even guest blog. We have a YouTube channel, an RSS feed. We've cleaned up page speed times, set 301 redirects, checked for duplicate content. We use Bing and Google webmaster tools and have submitted a sitemap. We are indexed and webmaster tools see our keywords as relevant in our content. We have a robots.txt file configured properly. The only thing I can think of is that our services pages also display (as a truncated summary) on our homepage. Could this be considered duplicate content, and is this causing a problem? Is there anything else we can do? Or are we missing something vital? We thank you in advance for your help! Candice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus0 -
Best time to choose a canonical URL & 301 redirect
I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Winoman0 -
If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50. Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pete790 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Can the template increase the loading time of the site?
Hi, My site was built with WordPress. Very recently I had it redesigned. The problem is that now it takes a long time to download. I have spoken with a web designer who checked my site and said that after it was rebuilt, the template that was created included a lot of hard coding. Can this be the reason why my site now takes a long time to load? The hard coding factor? Thank you for your help. Sal P.S.: FYI the site only has a few plug-ins and the server is a good one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Having a hard time with duplicate page content
I'm having a hard time redirecting website.com/ to website.com The crawl report shows both versions as duplicate content. Here is my htaccess: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgman
RewriteBase /
#Rewrite bare to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.php$ http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L] I added the last 2 lines after seeing a Q&A here, but I don't think it has helped.0