Transferring old articles to new site even if they are written horribly
-
OK my question for today is...
If you currently have 300 articles on your current site but are building a new site would you transfer all of the articles over to the new site or focus on quality and rewrite the articles that had traffic? For example we have about 300 articles currently on our website 60 of which actually get traffic, We rewrote those articles to make sure they were written well. Someone thought that it would be best to simply transfer the other 240 articles over and rewrite them at another time to avoid 404 redirects. I would like your feedback on how you would approach this. Please be as detailed as possible explaining your thought process.
Thanks!
-
I would do the following:
-
Redirect every URL from the old site to the appropriate page on the new site.
-
Rewrite any content that is below standards prior to moving it over to the new site.
The old idea of having more pages meaning more internal pagerank, etc.. went out the window years ago with the Panda update.
-
-
In the end, it will be best to have all of the pages redirect. You will have a higher page count, more internal links, better overall site authority, and more chances to rank for more queries.
The first thing I would do is see what traffic the poorly-written articles have, and if it makes sense to rewrite them. Not sure what you mean by poorly written, is that an opinionated view, or is there data and feedback stating the articles are bad? If they have zero visitors over a 3 month span, I would see why.
Second, look at why the better written articles do so well. Is it the way they are written? The way the page visually is laid out? (prettier is better) Is the topic more heavily searched for? Did you share or market those posts or pages differently than the other ones? Spend a bit of time in analytics and webmaster tools to analyze some of the less-quality pages, and you might discover a trend.
If you choose to redirect, I would make sure to test all the redirects when you are done as Biron29 stated. The slightest variation in the URL will cause the redirect to fail. Screaming Frog seo spider is a great resource for testing for 404 errors, and its free up to a certain number of URLs.
-
Well in my mind the first step would be to have a really solid 301 redirect strategy. Moz has a great article here regarding redirects. I say this because the slightest name change or location change can cause a 404 error. Secondly I would focus first on the content that is most valuable to carry over first. Thirdly and lastly I would go through and evaluate the quality and relevance of the articles not receiving traffic and find out why. Then you can adjust to take calculated steps to generate traffic for these articles as well. So that long description was to say yes I would carry all the content over use your 301 redirects and canonical urls and adjust the content as needed to increase its value. Hope this helps!
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
-
Best Site Architecture tool for analysis my & competitors site?
Hello All, I am really confused with my current architecture for Ecommerce site, can you please suggest any tool or software where I can analysis mine and competitors site architecture ? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pragnesh96390 -
How do I reduce the amount of internal links on my site?
Hi, Can someone help me with reducing the amount of internal links on our site please? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk Thanks Charlie
On-Page Optimization | | The-Present-Finder0 -
Site appears to rank very low
Hi, A site we manage is ranking very low for it's main key phrases. The site is www.moremouse.com. For example for the phrase "orlando vacation rentals" it ranks around page 12 which seems very low considering the DA, PA, links, etc. compared to many sites ranking much much higher. Can anyone see anything obvious that is causing it to rank so low? Thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | QbicIS0 -
Google picking up old pages
I recently redesigned a site that had all the keywords it was ranking for going to the home page. Now I have specific pages for each of these keywords but I'm seeing the home page (not the page that, if I do an on page optimization by hand in MOZ gives me an A rating) showing up in the auto reports (assuming pages Google sees for these keywords related to the url) as F's. They're all pointing to the home page. I've redirected the old index.html home page to the new but I suspect the reason is actually these pages (were) ranking for these terms (though none too well - all but one were not in the top 50 and one was 45) because these rankings are all dropping as well. I'm at a loss, with the site replaced, as to how to correct this and tell Google these keyword phrases all have their own pages now. I've dug through this forum and the only applicable answer I can see would be to add these phases to the home page (where they all rank for now) with anchored links to their new (A rated by Moz for these terms when I hand enter them) singular pages? Or is it just a waiting game?
On-Page Optimization | | adworksofboca0 -
H1 Tags for Articles in Blog Category - confused ;-(
Dear Seomoz community This is my first post here. Until now I was only browsing the Q&A and learned a lot just by reading the existing topics. Since we launched our website with a new design last week I started to heavily use Seomoz to track down missing tags, descriptions and other on page issues. Just out of curiosity I checked the page outline of the Seomoz blog. I was really surprised! Seomoz uses only H1 tags on their blog main page. Each article is wrapped in an H1 plus the blog title. I am a total SEO beginner but until today I was thinking that using several H1 tags on one page is not optimal. We use one H1 tag on our site for the magazine category description (for example http://www.siam2nite.com/magazine ) and then for the articles H2. So my question. Should I change my H2 to H1 for the magazine articles like Seomoz did? Would really appreciate your advise on this Regards, Menelik
On-Page Optimization | | menelik0 -
Google Fonts & Site Speed
Hello, Does the use of one google font slow down a website enough to effect load speed and thus rankings? Here's the ones we're choosing from: www.google.com/webfonts How do we know if the one we choose is too slow? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Good Site Navigation verses Success
I have been experimenting with the number of links on our pages verses the number of hits we get. Success seems to be tied to having hundreds of links on a page verses ease of navigation. We have a research company that sells research on educational topics. Last November I decided to divide our category of literature research topics into 10 different subtopics and redistribute the links to the subtopic pages. The main literature research page had over 800 links on it. It was one of our top performing pages. I was hoping that by spreading the links out in logical categories i could distribute the wealth and have better navigation for the user. Now after 6 months the traffic to that page has dropped 800% and the sub-pages have only gained a very minimal percentage. Overall, the hits in the literature genre have dropped from 560 per month to around 80. Ouch! I thought Google would love this strategy, as it reduced page load time, links on a page and made the navigation logical and easier to see all available options. Not the case. Question is: Should I keep the subpages but go back and put all the links back on the main literature page, putting it back up to 800 links? Should I get rid of the subpages, because the links will all be on the main literature page if I move them? Any advice is appreciated! Karen
On-Page Optimization | | eworld0