Migrate Old Archive Content?

[frantan]

Hi,

Our team has recently acquired several newsletter titles from a competitor.

We are currently deciding how to handle the archive content on their website which now belongs to us.

We are thinking of leaving the content on their site (so as not to suddenly remove a chunk of their website and harm them) but also replicating it on ours with a canoncial link to say our website is the original source.

The articles on their site go back as far as 2010.

Do you think it would help or hinder our site to have a lot of old archive content added to it? I'm thinking of content freshness issues.Even though the content is old some of it will still be interesting or relevant.

Or do you think the authority and extra traffic this content could bring in makes it worth migrating.

Any help gratefully received on the old content issue or the idea of using canonical links in this way.

Many Thanks

[frantan]

Thanks for all your help with this.

[evolvingSEO]

I agree 100% with Hutch and Patrick. Your best bet is to dive into whatever analytics data you have for the content. I would probably follow a rough procedure like:

• Identify content no one is looking at, is not ranking, is old/poor - start there and you can probably trim out the lowest quality stuff - remove completlely or just noindex to be more conservative
• Then find the other extreme - think 80/20 - find the obvious highest achievers and those are the ones you'd most want to maybe move over or maintain in some way. If any high achievers are getting traffic despite being old/poor - that won't last - so update them.
• The hardest to figure out is the mediocre performing stuff (moderate visits, moderate search visibility). I would probably put all the moderate content in a spreadsheet. Categorize it by topic. Figure out what can stand alone, or be consolidated. Basically you want to arrive at a situation where every piece of content you keep is, if not recent, at least still quality (quality as defined by: unique, well executed, good design, good UX, helpful or entertaining).

The content audit process mentioned by Patrick is a great way to do this analysis with data, but you can also just use some traffic and basic segmenting in analytics as an easier method.

You could also try some tools like URL Profiler, which cake make such an audit process a little easier.

That's just decided if you should keep it - when it comes to migrating I guess it depends on your ultimate vision for the company / branding.

I wouldn't try any tricky things like putting a canonical to say your site is the original source. Google probably knows this is not true, and a canonical is just a "suggestion" so there's no guarantee they will honor it. I would be more in favor of migrating it to your site, removing from the old with a 301 redirect to your site and maybe just a note on your site saying "this article originally appeared in ...." and be really transparent with the user.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Great answer, Hutch.

Building on that - Moz offers an extremely comprehensive content audit that goes step by step on how to evaluate your content.

No blanket answer - this will take time and research, but it will make your site so much better overall!

Good luck!

[Hutch42]

I think you are asking a large, loaded question.  I do not think there is a "yes you should" or "no you should not" answer for your complex question.

This content is upwards of nearly half a decade old, is it still relevant?  Instead of a blanket yes or no, I think you should go through all of it and see what is still valuable, depending on your industry it could be half of it, or it could be none, but you should be looking at each piece individually, not the entire site as one whole. For moving it, if the content is good I think placing it on your site (as I assume you want to consolidate) and redirecting to the new location is fine, plus if you do it as you go, you will not have a massive surge in your content, or drop in the old site but a gradual shift over a period of time.

Hope this helps.