Migrate Old Archive Content?
-
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
-
Thanks for all your help with this.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Dulpicate Content being reported
Hi I have a new client whose first MA crawl report is showing lots of duplicate content. The main batch of these are all the HP url with an 'attachment' part at the end such as: www.domain.com/?attachment_id=4176 As far as i can tell its some sort of slide show just showing a different image in the main frame of each page, with no other content. Each one does have a unique meta title & H1 though. Whats the best thing to do here ? Not a problem and leave as is Use the paremeter handling tool in GWT Canonicalise, referencing the HP or other solution ? Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230