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.
What to do with "trendy" content that is no longer relevant?
-
Hi all,
My company is in the fashion/jewelry industry and we regularly create short content describing the latest trends in jewelry. We do not include any sort of date reference on the content, which means that a searcher who gets to our site has no way of knowing if this is a trend from 2008 or 2016.
Does anyone have any experience with the best way to handle this? I want to remain relevant for our customers. It seems like a big disservice to our customers to show them a "trend" which trended 5 years ago. Is there a benefit to keeping this content around or would it be better to cycle it off the site after 6 months or so?
Thanks for any advice or experience you have!
R.
-
We generally recommend keeping all of that content on the website, there are only a few cases where you would want to remove the content (for example if there are copyright or legal issues involved). Your site, over time, will become larger, and this is a good thing.
Fashion trends tend to come back, so in 5 or 10 years if you still have that content on the site it may become relevant again. And, if it's been there for 10 years then there is a good chance that it will rank well--because it's been there 10 years and it's trusted.
-
For me, this all depends on whether or not that content has any backlinks and/or gets good search traffic. If neither, then I'd remove it. But if people are still really actually finding the page through long-tail search, then maybe it doesn't matter too much if the trend is from 2008 since people still like it enough to search it out.
If it's linked or has social shares but currently gets no engagement, 301 it to the most relevant content that does. Logan mentions that can dilute the link juice, but you'd be directing it to a place that people actually want to go, so I think you'll be fine there. If it has no links, no social shares, and gets no traffic, it's just dead weight that dilutes your content quality. I'd rather have Google seeing high engagement with all corners of my site rather than just a small number of pages.
The point is that I think you'd do well to pay attention to what your readers are actually engaging with and let that be your guide on whether a particular piece of content stays or goes.
-
Learn which of these posts pull traffic or are consumed by on-site visitors. Find out which pull entry traffic that processes through the cart. Make more similar posts.
After that you will be left with some duds. These can be improved or deleted.
-
I'd recommend keeping it on the site. This type of content has a good chance at garnering some quality links, so you don't want to dilute their value by redirecting.
Since your content is very time-relevant, it would be very beneficial to your users to include this information. It could also help with organic long-tail queries, in the case where someone searchers 'fashion trends for summer 2016'. You're currently not providing the date information, so your chances of appearing for that query are much lower than if you had date-published info directly on the page.
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
-
Thoughts on adding "near me" to title tag for local SEO?
I want to lean out my title tags and will most likely be doing an A/B test. They currently have the "Near Me" modifier in there, which I believe Google can distinguish local SEO without it. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | imjonny1230 -
Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
How "Top" or "Best" are considered when in front of keyword
I would like to know if someone has proven info how google today counts words "Top" or "Best" when in front of main keywords you try to rank for. For example, if I have a keyword like "Restaurants in Madrid" and I optimize that page without using words "top" or "best" will it have good rankings for keywords "top restaurants in madrid" and "best restaurants in madrid" ? I suppose that google is smart enough to know that web page should be good ranked even without using those 2 words but would like to know percentage of my loss if I just exclude those words from title tag and other important onpage factors. I want to rank high for all the 3 combinations, with "top", with "best" and without it in front so searching for best solution. I plan just to add one of those words, for example "top" and hope that google will know that "top" = "best" 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | m2webs0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Multilingual site with untranslated content
We are developing a site that will have several languages. There will be several thousand pages, the default language will be English. Several sections of the site will not be translated at first, so the main content will be in English but navigation/boilerplate will be translated. We have hreflang alternate tags set up for each individual page pointing to each of the other languages, eg in the English version we have: etc In the spanish version, we would point to the french version and the english version etc. My question is, is this sufficient to avoid a duplicate content penalty for google for the untranslated pages? I am aware that from a user perspective, having untranslated content is bad, but in this case it is unavoidable at first.
On-Page Optimization | | jorgeapartime0 -
Duplicate Content on Event Pages
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Duplicate Content when Using "visibility classes" in responsive design layouts? - a SEO-Problem?
I have text in the right column of my responsive layout which will show up below the the principal content on small devices. To do this I use visibility classes for DIVs. So I have a DIV with with a unique style text that is visible only on large screen sizes. I copied the same text into another div which shows only up only on small devices while the other div will be hidden in this moment. Technically I have the same text twice on my page. So this might be duplicate content detected as SPAM? I'm concerned because hidden text on page via expand-collapsable textblocks will be read by bots and in my case they will detect it twice?Does anybody have experiences on this issue?bestHolger
On-Page Optimization | | inlinear0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0