Removing Low Rank Pages Help Others Shine?
-
Good Morning!
I have a handful of pages that are not ranking very well, if at all. They are not driving any traffic, and are realistically just sorta "there". I have already determined I will not be bringing them over to our new web redesign.
My question, could it be in our best interest to try and save these pages with ZERO traction and optimize them? Re-purpose them? Or does having them on our site currently muddy up our other pages?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
-
If they have no traffic and no links, I would not move them.
I would only re-purpose them if you think that by combining/editing them they would have value, but in a situation like this, that usually isn't the case.
(Unless we are talking about a significantly large percentage of your website becoming 404--in that case some rewriting/repurposing would be in order.)
-
I think you have the right idea. If these low ranking pages have thin or low quality content, you can definitely re-purpose or remove them. It will probably lead to a better website/user experience. You can also consider merging content if you think it will make for better quality content overall.
I would take a look at this Moz Blog post on content auditing. It's pretty much the most thorough guide out there on the subject as far as I'm concerned.
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
-
URL Errors Help - 350K Page Not Founds in 22 days
Got a good one for you all this time... For our site, Google Search Console is reporting 436,758 "Page Not Found" errors within the Crawl Error report. This is an increase of 350,000 errors in just 22 days (on Sept 21 we had 87,000 errors which was essentially consistently at that number for the previous 4 months or more). Then on August 22nd the errors jumped to 140,000, then climbed steadily from the 26th until the 31st reaching 326,000 errors, and then climbed again slowly from Sept 2nd until today's 436K. Unfortunately I can only see the top 1,000 erroneous URLs in the console, of which they seem to be custom Google tracking URLs my team uses to track our pages. A few questions: 1. Is there anyway to see the full list of 400K URLs Google is reporting they cannot find?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usnseomoz
2. Should we be concerned at all about these?
3. Any other advice? thanks in advance! C0 -
Silo not ranking for main silo page - what can I do?
Hi everyone, I set up a silo for my page http://werkzeug-kasten.com/ . Unfortunately only the silos inner pages rank very good. These are for example http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/keyword-analyse/ for "Keywordanalyse SEO Freiburg" <a>http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/onpage-seo/</a> for "Onpage SEO Freiburg" ... but the silos main page <a>http://werkzeug-kasten.com/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo-freiburg/</a> does not rank for "SEO Freiburg". Do you have any idea why that might be? Cheers, Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
SEO: Can you rank Amazon product Pages ?
Hi Guys Just a general question about doing SEO for our product pages... We have a range of products on Amazon and wondered if it is worth build some good links to our product pages to get them ranked higher in Google ?? Is it easier to rank Amazon product pages ?? Thanks Guys G Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Weird Page switch for a keyword in Google Rankings
Over this past weekend Google switched the page which usually showed in search results for keyword benchmarking. It went from from http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking to http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking-portal/osb. Also on Google the Rankings for the keyword 'benchmarking' sank from 15 to 47 for http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking Just looking for some theories or ideas or anyone that has had this happen to them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
How to get around Google Removal tool not removing redirected and 404 pages? Or if you don't know the anchor text?
Hello! I can’t get squat for an answer in GWT forums. Should have brought this problem here first… The Google Removal Tool doesn't work when the original page you're trying to get recached redirects to another site. Google still reads the site as being okay, so there is no way for me to get the cache reset since I don't what text was previously on the page. For example: This: | http://0creditbalancetransfer.com/article375451_influencial_search_results_for_.htm | Redirects to this: http://abacusmortgageloans.com/GuaranteedPersonaLoanCKBK.htm?hop=duc01996 I don't even know what was on the first page. And when it redirects, I have no way of telling Google to recache the page. It's almost as if the site got deindexed, and they put in a redirect. Then there is crap like this: http://aniga.x90x.net/index.php?q=Recuperacion+Discos+Fujitsu+www.articulo.org/articulo/182/recuperacion_de_disco_duro_recuperar_datos_discos_duros_ii.html No links to my site are on there, yet Google's indexed links say that the page is linking to me. It isn't, but because I don't know HOW the page changed text-wise, I can't get the page recached. The tool also doesn't work when a page 404s. Google still reads the page as being active, but it isn't. What are my options? I literally have hundreds of such URLs. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeanGodier0 -
My ranking spiked then died in the butt? why? Please help!
Hi guys, I have been persevering with this ranking for some time now and thought you might be able to help. Or direct me to where I can get help. I am learning a lot through SEOmoz but I am still very green. Basically on the 20th of the 12th we jumped up to a 2nd place listing and then dropped back down on the 17th of the 1st 2011. The site is http://mlb.broomeaccommodation.com.au and the search term is 'Broome Accommodation' as you can see it is a considerable drop and really affecting our bookings and sales figures. I have attached a link to a screen capture of the problem - http://exitforward.com/kimberleyaccomm/seomoz.png Interested to hear your thoughts and get some help on this frustrating matter Kind regards Bodie Czeladka
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bodie0