Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
-
Hey all,
When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)?
My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant?
Thanks in advance,
Roman
-
for the original poster - what did you end up doing - and did it make a difference??
(and) similar question but different...
If suddenly some 90% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 10%?
in the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages.
does this make a difference these days??
keep in mind that the 4,500 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place.
will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 500 indexed pages?
tia!!
-
I would personally still noindex because I would never recommend deleting something that I have not seen when it comes to site architecture. This way you really are not lose anything and you revert if you need to.
You may find that the lack of drops you down in ranking I doubt that will happen I really doubt it but I would not want you to delete having not seen your site.
Hopefully That helps,
Tom
-
Thomas,
Most of these pages have no backlinks and contain dated information. Would you still noindex vs delete the pages?
Thanks,
Roman
-
You could go back and improve the pages if you have any URLs from other sites or back links pointing to your content and you deleted that will not be good. Plus Google Will probably not like that you chop your site and half. If they are really worthless pages no index them So your crawl budget doesn't get ruined. To me removing content because there's small problems with the Page sounds about idea very bad idea.
-
I'd recommend you do neither.
If you set them to no-index, these issues won't matter, but you won't have lost the pages and whatever value they pose. Plus, it's generally good to keep any pages that aren't of their own accord, detrimental.
However, if you'd rather not do this, I'd look more favorably on removing them than fixing each one. That's a lot of work for very little reward - most likely, at least. Really, the answer depends on how much time you have and how fixing them would weight against the benefit(s) of doing other things.
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
-
SEO Migration Options
Hi Guys, We have a www.sitename.com.au domain name and looking to move into the US market, and other markets in the future such as UK, Canada, etc. We are reviewing our options. Currently the .com.au is ccTLD to Australia so won't perform well in US. It seems the best option at this stage is to get a generic domain Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like a .com. Then create different sub-folders for each country for example: .com our main country .com/us/ target us .com/uk/ Then in Google Search Console don't set country targeting for entire domain but use Hreflang Tags to specify the targeting for each page? -- This seems like a complex strategy to execute so i just want to check if this would be a optional option? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cerednicenko0 -
Multiple Blog Postings
Hi! Will posting more than one blog a day help with SEO? For example: I’d like to post 3 times a day if it will help. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EmSt0 -
Using AggregateReview markup to generate star sinppets for wordpress blog posts? OK or Spam?
Do you believe using a plugin that allows visitors to rate your blog posts and then generating AggregateReview markup code for each blog post is in accordance with google guidelines? I saw there are a couple of wordpress plugins that offer this functionality. Anybody who had any negative experience? Star icons will certainly increase visibility in SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Best to Post Dynamic Content (Listings) under "Posts" in Wordpress?
My commercial real estate web site is being migrated to Wordpress from Drupal. Is it advisable to place dynamic content that will use taxonomy under "Posts" ? Listings will be changed every few months and there could be anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of them on the site. Developers have given me different advice. One has been adamant that listings and neighborhood pages (there will be about 25 neighborhood pages) should not be in the post section which is to be strictly reserved for blog entries. The last thing I want is to create a site structure which is unfriendly to SEO!!!! I would very much appreciate the perspective of anyone proficient with Wordpress and SEO. Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
What is the Current SEO Value of Pingbacks and Trackbacks on Blogs
The latest Google updates have said that reciprocal linking isn't such a hot thing - so I am wondering if anyone has any guidance for those of us who work with WordPress bloggers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dotJ0 -
Company Blog Vs External Blog
Hi there, We write articles for our blog on a regular basis, maybe two times per week. One of those articles I usually place on an external blog first getting some external links pointing into my product pages and using a rel canonical on that article on my blog pointing to the external post, so that the external post get's all the credit. The reason I put this on my blog is I use this to point to from my email marketing activities. The question is, do you think this makes best practice? trying to get more out of this blog post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840 -
Need Guidance On SEO Campaign
Hello, my website is www.mybluedish.com and I am launching an SEO campaign to increase our rankings, especially for the keyword 'satellite internet'. We used to be ranked #5 for this keyword and Google made some changes about 9 months ago that dropped us way back. We have recovered a lot back to #18 now, but have been stuck here for a while. I want to step up our SEO campaign and have come up with the following campaign. Could any SEO's please tell me if you think the following is the make up of a solid SEO campaign or if it should be adjusted? Thank you. 12 new blog articles/month 24 Articles submitted to 10 different directories each (total of 200 article directory submissions)/month 1 basic Press Release from PR.com/month 200 do follow blog comments/month 10 paid blog posts (on other people’s blogs of PR 1-5)/month
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0