Delete or not delete outdated content
-
Hi there!
We run a website about a region in Italy, the Langhe area, where we write about wine and food, local culture, and we give touristic informations.The website also sports a nice events calendar: in 4 years we (and our users) loaded more than 5700 events. Now, we're starting to have some troubles managing this database.
The database related to events is huge both in file size and number of rows. There are a lot of images that eat up disk space, and also it's becoming difficult to manage all the data in our backend. Also, a lot of users are entering the website by landing on outdated events.
I was wondering if it could be a good idea to delete events older than 6 months: the idea was to keep only the most important and yearly recurring events (which we can update each year with fresh information), and trash everything else.
This of course means that 404 errors will increase, and also that our content will gettin thinner, but at the same time we'll have a more manageable database, and the content will be more relevant and "clean".
What do you think?
thank you
Best
-
Thank you Donna. We have seen a lot of success with the pruning method for outdated content. I'm glad the article has helped you.
-
I love this post by Everett Sizemore from last year and refer to it often. It's a step-by-step how-to for auditing content. Chapter 8 talks about considerations when deciding whether to rewrite / remove / redirect / consolidate content. Give it a read and see if it helps clarify matters for you.
-
For old content which is expired - just let them 404 or redirect to a newer version of the page (if available).
For new content that is going to expire you could use the unavailable after tag - see also this advice from Matt Cutts on content that expires (it's more about products for e-commerce - but the general principle is the same).Dirk
-
Especially with recurring events, duplicate content also might be causing you issues down the line. You could always delete the events which are older than 12 months, and 301 the old event URLs to the current or upcoming ones. This way, you won't have duplicate content issues with recurring events, and searchers won't be landing on outdated events.
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
-
Regarding internal duplicate content
Suppose two of my webpages from the same site are having 30% to 35% common content. The reason behind this common content is that I put same data and images (in the main content area) since both pages are partially related. But, title tag, meta description, h1 tag, urls are different.
On-Page Optimization | | b.me
My questions are Can Google consider it as duplicate content?
Can it hamper the ranking of my pages ?
How can I deal with it?0 -
Content on product category pages - does Google care?
Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?
On-Page Optimization | | BarryBuckman0 -
Should extra content be added to item page or resource center?
We run an ecommerce company which sells machines. After the machine is used for X amount of time, we suggest changing the blades in the machines. We have a resource center for customer convenience. We are creating videos and content on how to change the blades in each machine. (each machine is a different process). Do we create videos and content in the resource center and link to the product page or do we beef up our content on the product page by adding that information there? 1 part of us thinks - "The new blade-changing content" is valuable to that product so buyers know the process before buying and hopefully gain some rank juice on the item pages. The other part of us thinks - Keep all resources in the resource center and link to learning resources from the product pages. This version doesn't beef up our product pages but seems to be the logical place to hose the content on the website. Thoughts? Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | dkeipper0 -
Deleted pages still registering as 404 pages.
I have a an all html site that I can only work on through the ftp. The previous marketing company ran a script that built thousands of location landing pages, but all they did was change the tags and headers and the keywords in the pages, other than that they are all duplicate pages. I removed them, but Google is reading them as 404 pages. How do I tell Google those pages don't exist? or do I just need to let the bots crawl it a few times and it will see that eventually?
On-Page Optimization | | SwanJob0 -
Duplicate Content from on Competitor's site?
I've recently discovered large blocks of content on a competitors site that has been copy and pasted from a client's site. From what I know, this will only hurt the competitor and not my client since my guy was the original. Is this true? Is there any risk to my client? Should we take action? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | Dino640 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Number of characters to duplicate content
I wonder how much characters in a page title so it can be characterized for Googleas duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | imoveiscamposdojordao
Sorry for the English, I used Google Translator.
I'm from Brazil 😄
Thanks.0 -
Creating Content for Several Local Keywords
I have a client who is in the lead generation business for a specific aesthetic service. The company basically generates leads through SEO and sells them to hundreds of local businesses across the US and Canada. There is some serious competition for the main service keyword (this is not the real keyword) e.g. “liposuction” and over the past year we have seen rankings fall significantly (from top 3 to 13-15). But... what I have found is that most of the traffic, particularly the highly converting traffic, comes from local keyword variations e.g. “liposuction in san diego”. However, these keywords are also highly competitive because there are several local businesses in these areas. How would you suggest creating content for these pages when they are all extremely similar and we need to target 100s of cities? For example the page “liposuction in san diego” is very similar to the page “liposuction in sacramento”, ect ect. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | Bartell0