I want to take down some pages, how do I inform google?
-
Hey Guys,
I'm hoping someone can help - I'm in the midst of a site re-design - whilst one of our biggest reasons for the redesign was to create more space to write valuable content and unique content I have been reading other posts on moz about content auditing. I have come across a few articles in my own blog that are from 250 - 300 words to which the articles seem similar and the traffic is low.
I'm wondering while I'm left to consolidate these articles and create a fresh article for each entry that is more in-depth, when I consolidate or delete these pages - do I need to inform google these pages have now been deleted? If so using Wordpress what is the best way to do this?
Cheers and would appreciate some advise
Thanks
-
Genius! Thanks alot Dirk! Always helpful!!!!
-
Hi Justin,
The easiest way is just to take the pages off line - they will give a 404 status & after a while they will disappear from the index.
If you are regrouping the content into a new article - it's probably better to redirect these pages to the new one, using a 301 redirect. Here's an how-to: http://www.howto301redirect.com/wordpress-page-301-redirect/ (using a plugin). You could also manage the redirect directly in htaccess - see example here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/proper-301-redirect-in-htaccess (you can manage the htaccess via the Yoast plugin).
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Page Speed or Site Speed which one does Google considered a ranking signal
I've read many threads online which proves that website speed is a ranking factor. There's a friend whose website scores 44 (slow metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Despite that his website is slow, he outranks me on Google search results. It confuses me that I optimized my website for speed, but my competitor's slow site outperforms me. On Six9ja.com, I did amazing work by getting my target score which is 100 (fast metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Coming to my Google search console tool, they have shown that some of my pages have average scores, while some have slow scores. Google search console tool proves me wrong that none of my pages are fast. Then where did the fast metrics went? Could it be because I added three Adsense Javascript code to all my blog posts? If so, that means that Adsense code is slowing website speed performance despite having an async tag. I tested my blog post speed and I understand that my page speed reduced by 48 due to the 3 Adsense javascript codes added to it. I got 62 (Average metric score). Now, my site speed is=100, then my page speed=62 Does this mean that Google considers page speed rather than site speed as a ranking factor? Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/YSxSwOG **Regarding: **https://six9ja.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingsmart1 -
Seeing very few pages analysed re: Mobile usability, in Google Seach Console - why?
Hi Mozzers, Under Mobile Usability, in Google Search Console, I am seeing very few website pages getting analysed - 10 out of 40 static pages, on the website in question. Is this to be expected or does this indicated an indexing problem on mobile?
Reporting & Analytics | | McTaggart0 -
Email traffic tracking in Google Analytics
Hello! I have a question about how to assure email traffic is properly tracked in GA > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. **First, some background... ** Our company (Wisconsin's largest group dental practice) is about to revamp the way we try to re-capture patients who don't have a future appointment set with us. Part of that process will include emails. Those emails will point back to our website to request an appointment. Now to the question... Is there anything special we should do to assure that links coming to the website and the resulting appointment request goal conversions track appropriately and appear under "Email" in the Default Channel Group of Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels area of GA? For example, should we use Campaign URL Builder to establish UTM links? Thanks in advance for any feedback. Erik
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO0 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
No-indexed pages are still showing up as landing pages in Google Analytics
Hello, My website is a local job board. I de-indexed all of the job listing pages on my site (anything that starts with http://www.localwisejobs.com/job/). When I search site:localwisejobs.com/job/, nothing shows up. So I think that means the pages are not being indexed. When I look in Google Analytics at Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages, none of the job listing pages show up. But when I look at Acquisition > Channels > Organic and then click Landing Page as the primary dimension, the /job pages show up in there. Why am I seeing this discrepency in Organic Landing pages? And why would the /job pages be showing up as landing pages even though they aren't indexed?
Reporting & Analytics | | mztobias0 -
Why is this tag not firing in Google Analytics?
I setup Google Tag Manager on this site- http://germanhausbarn.com I am trying to setup event tracking for the donate, newsletter, and Contact Us button at the bottom of the page. The most recent version is published, and I ran debug and it shows that they fire, but nothing is coming up in analytics. Any thoughts?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google Analytics Organic search queries aren't being updated, even though I'm still seeing results in all our typical results pages.
We pushed some new changes to the site and Google Analytics is no longer updating the Organic Search queries listing, even though traffic is consistent and and we're still landing results in all our typical keyword searches. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | unclekaos0 -
Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?
Hi There I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools. We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found. However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control. This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate. Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further. Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri.. URL Discovery Date
Reporting & Analytics | | ArenaFlowers.com
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011 I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control. Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves? Thanks! Sam.0