Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    7
    1004
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • xpers
      xpers last edited by

      I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/

      It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings.

      When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve.

      I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website?

      Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • dohertyjf
        dohertyjf last edited by

        This is a very valid question, in my opinion, and one that I have thought about a lot. I even did it on a site before on a UGC section where there were about 30k empty questions, many of which were a reputation nightmare for the site. We used the parameters of:

        • Over a year old
        • Has not received an organic visit in the past year

        We 410d all of them as they did not have any inbound links and we just wanted them out of the index. I believe they were later 301d, and that section of the site has now been killed off.

        Directly after the pages were removed, we saw a lift of ~20% in organic traffic to that section of the site. That maintained, and over time that section of the site started getting more visits from organic as well.

        I saw it as a win and went through with it because:

        • They were low quality
        • They already didn't receive traffic
        • By removing them, we'd get more pages that we wanted crawled, crawled.

        I think Gary's answer of "create more high quality content" is too simplistic. Yes, keep moving forward in the direction you are, but if you have the time or can hire someone else to do it, and those pages are not getting traffic, then I'd say remove them. If they are getting traffic, maybe do a test of going back and making them high quality to see if they drive more traffic.

        Good luck!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BradsDeals
          BradsDeals @MattAntonino last edited by

          Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.

          Things not addressed in that thread:

          • If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
          • The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
          • Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
          • The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • MattAntonino
            MattAntonino @TimHolmes last edited by

            Haha I read this question earlier, saw the post come across feedly and knew what I needed to do with it. Just a matter of minutes. 🙂 You're right though - I would've probably said remove earlier as well. It's a toss up but usually when they clarify, I try to follow. (Sometimes they talk nonsense of course, but you just have to filter that out.)

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • TimHolmes
              TimHolmes @MattAntonino last edited by

              Just pipped me to it 🙂

              MattAntonino 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • TimHolmes
                TimHolmes last edited by

                Hi Xpers.

                I was reading a very timely, if not the same issue article today from Barry Schwartz over at SEO Round Table. He has been following a conversation from Gary Illyes at Google, whom apparently does not recommend removing content from a site to help you recover from a Panda issue, but rather recommends increasing the number of higher quality pages etc.

                If you are continuing to get more traffic by adding your new larger higher quality articles, I would simply continue in the same vein. There is no reason why you cannot still continue to share your content on social platforms too.

                In the past I may have suggested removing some thin/outsdated content and repointing to a newer more relevant piece, but in light of this article I now may start to think a tad differently. Hopefully some of the other Mozzers might have more thoughts on Barry's post too.

                Here is the article fresh off the press today - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • MattAntonino
                  MattAntonino last edited by

                  Google's Gary Illyes basically just answered this on Twitter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html

                  "We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff"

                  So rather than spend a lot of time on old work, move forward and improve. If there's terrible stuff, I'd of course remove it. But if it's just not super-high quality, I would do as Gary says in this instance and work on new things.

                  Truthfully, getting Google to recrawl year or two or five stuff can be tough. If they don't recrawl it you don't even get the benefit until they do, if there were a benefit. Moving forward seems to make more sense to me.

                  TimHolmes BradsDeals 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • lindsey.steinkamp

                    Why has my website been removed from Bing?

                    I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site?  Thank you!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp
                    0
                  • kirbyf

                    Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice

                    I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf
                    0
                  • falguniinnovative

                    How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines

                    Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative
                    0
                  • andypatalak

                    Mobile website on a different URL address?

                    My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak
                    0
                  • HashtagHustler

                    Moving half my website to a new website: 301?

                    Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler
                    0
                  • SEOWizards

                    Article Marketing / Article Posting

                    I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards
                    0
                  • MTalhaImtiaz

                    How to check a website's architecture?

                    Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz
                    0
                  • fleetway

                    Website stuck on the second page

                    Hi there Can you please help me. I did some link building and worked with website last couple of months and rank got better but all keywords are on the second page, some of them are 11th and 12th. Is there anything I did wrong and google dont allow the website on the first page? Or should I just go on. It just looks strange keywords are on the second page for 2 weeks and not going to the first page for any single day. The website is quite old, around 10 years. Anyone knows what it is or where I can read about it?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fleetway
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.