What to do with old conversion pages
-
Hey folks! I have a ton of old conversion pages from past trade shows, old webinars, etc that are either getting no traffic or very little. Wondering if I should just 404 them out? Here's an example:
http://marketing.avidxchange.com/rent-manager-user-conference-demo-request-2015
For the pages getting traffic (from PPC, referral links, organic) my presumption is to keep those. The only problem is we have multiple instances of the same asset (prior marketers would just clone them for different campaigns), so in those cases should I 301 them to one version?
Looking for advice on best practices here for future instances. Such as future trade shows, after we use the conversion pages at an event, should I just delete/404 them? Cleaning up old pages should I just delete/404? They don't have any value really and they're annoying to have hanging around. Thanks!
-
If you delete the page, and it had links pointing to it, the server will return a 404 not found page, which makes you lose any authority they had to pass to the main domain or subdomain.
Using the 301 redirects at least you take a portion of the authority back to your Website. If your CMS is somehow advanced, it should be easy to hide those "expired pages" from the page list avoiding any confusion.
But again, if you redirect the page, lets say about am inbound marketing conference in Boston to the main domain that does not "serve" any kind of useful content to the user that was actually expecting the page of the Boston conference, that won't help at all. Instead, try to 301 them to something that the user may be interested in, even tho the event he was looking for is no longer available; in this case, it could be a page listing all the upcoming inbound marketing conferences (in/near Boston). By going that route you favor your site by making the pagerank flow to the other page and you also help the user, which is the primary target.
-
Thanks Federico! Follow up questions is that we have the ability to "expire" these landing pages. Here's the help article explaining these. Do you suggest taking this route? I'm thinking maybe only the pages that get links we should do this for?
I'm thinking no and just delete them for a variety of reasons but here's the major ones:
-All of our marketing platform hosted content (blog, email, landing pages) roll up to one subodomain - marketing.avidxchange.com. I'd hate to have these thing pages lying around and taking all the authority that we would rather pass onto the blog.
-It's just generally annoying to have a ton of expired content lying around in our CMS. We have a group of 4 in there every day. -
If the event has already passed, and as you say there's no longer any value on those pages, you can just delete them. Or a good option would be to 301 them to a page that explains why the page is no longer available and offer the user other related pages that he could might be interested in.
Hope that 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
-
Should I change my targeted page?
Currently I have a site where the targeted keywords were on the home page, with links built to the homepage. It has been widely recognised though that Google is looking more and more for specific content on webpages that holds greater relevance to search queries. As such, I switched this targeted page to other created webpages - changing metatags and creating more relevant content for respective keywords. I thought this would improve rankings, however, upon doing this there was a sharp fall in rankings for keywords. Is there anything that I could have done wrong, or can do better so that keywords move back up the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Page authority old and new website
Dear all, I tried to find this question using the search option but cannot find the exact same problem. This is the thing: I launched a new website in January, replacing our old website that did pretty good in the SERPs. The old website is still running on a subdomain old.website.com and the new website is on www.website.com (www.denhollandsche.nl) Both sites are indexed by google right now, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. For our main keyword, the page on the new website has an authority of "23" and the exact same page (some minor differences) on the old website still has an authority of "30". Both currently are on the second page of google while some time ago, they where still on position 2/3/4. My question is: if I would take down the old website and make a 301 redirect for the old page with P/A 30, to point to the new page with a P/A 23, will the p/a of this new page take over the P/A of the old page? What effects can I expect? The reason the old website is still running is that google images still shows images from old.domain.com in stead of images from the new website... Thanks for your help guys!
Technical SEO | | stepsstones0 -
Redirect a page intended for iframe
we built an interactive calculator that gets iframe embedded in our blog and landing pages. the blog that embeds it is doing well the problem is that the iframe source html page is also indexed by google and is on the second page of results. which we don't want as it doesn't have any context/branding/call to action/etc. if i put a noindex meta tag on the iframe html source page, will that remove the indexing of the pages that consume it in an iframe?
Technical SEO | | icstars0 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
Old Blog
I have an old blog that I started long ago and it has tons of content. I'm thinking about migrating it my current blog but am worried about panda and bringing over mediocre content. The content is fine, not bad not good. Should I bring it over or should I just delete the blog?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0