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.
How to deal with lot of old content that doesn't drive traffic - delete?
-
Hi community, i hope someone can help me with this,
We are migrating our e-commerce site next februari. I'm preparing the content migration. For a large part exact copies of our product listing and product detail pages will be migrated.
However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore. It actually is just worthless content. (Not only as a traffic driver, this also counts for extremely low to none internal driven traffic (both internal search and internal navigation).We have about 4.000+ blogs of which about 100 drive the most traffic (mostly incited by e-mail and social campaigns and internal navigation promoted on important category landing pages during some period.
Is it a bad signal to search engines to delete these old content pages? I.a.: going from a content-rich to a content-poor site?
Off course I will migrate the top 100 traffic earning content and provide proper redirects to them -
Hi there,
It is not a bad signal if you are in fact deleting low-value content that does not drive traffic or back links. Content is becoming more of a 'quality over quantity' game (thankfully). If you are making your site more efficient for Google to crawl and condensing SEO authority (link juice) and pointing more of that your more 'important' pages, you could actually see an uptick in business from organic search. I will note that you should look at your blog posts to see if there are opportunities to update them to make them more informative and/or more current.
If any of the posts you are removing have inbound links or rankings, you will want to properly 301 redirect them. Take a look at these resources where sites removed old pages and maintained site performance or even saw an uptick. The content audit portion of your analysis is going to be crucial, you must be sure you are not deleting content that is driving traffic.
- Why We Deleted 900 Blog Posts And What Happened Next
Hope this 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
-
Write new articles or republish old ones?
Hi,
Content Development | | Enrico_Cassinelli
we run a tourism information website about a region in italy, and each year, during special occasions such as christmas, easter and so on we publish an article with a "what to do on Christmas / Easter / .... in the Langhe" (collecting events, activities, etc.). Is it better to "reuse" the old articles and change only the year in the title and of course the content (providing that we are gonna keep the URL without year), or to publish a new one? thanks!0 -
What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?
Hi everyone, On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients. Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed. I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do? Thank you very much in advance.
Content Development | | Intergaz0 -
Reusing content on different ccTLDs
We have a client with many international locations, each of which has their own ccTLD domain and website. Eg company-name.com, company-name.com.au, company-name.co.uk, company-name.fr, etc. Each domain/website only targets their own country, and the SEO aim is for each site to only rank well within their own country. We work for an individual country's operations, and the international head office wants to re-use our content on other countries' websites. While there would likely be some optimsation of the content for each region, there may be cases where it is re-used identically. We are concerned that this will cause duplicate content issues. I've read that the separate ccTLDs should indicate to search engines that content is aimed at the different locations - is this sufficient or should we be doing anything extra to avoid duplicate content penalties? Or should we argue that they simply must not do this at all and develop unique content for each? Thanks Julian
Content Development | | Bc.agency0 -
Does a "Read More" button to open up the full content affect SEO?
As we've been refining our metrics for gauging whether or not a blog is effective -- if people are engaging with it -- one of the strategies we've seen (e.g. NYT, WaPo, Yahoo!) is "Read More." I've read a few articles with some who advocate using it and others who discourage it. Does anyone have any history adding "Read More" to their content and the effect it had?
Content Development | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Duplicate Content
I have a service based client that is interested in optimizing his website for all the services that he provides in all the locations that he provides them in. For example: Service 1, location 1 Service 1, location 2 Service 2, location 1 Service 2, location 2 He wants to essentially create an individual page for each of the above, but i'm concerned that he will be penalized for duplicate content. Each of the pages would have the keyword in the url, page title and within the main body of content. We would certainly alter the content somewhat, but not sure how much a difference this would make. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | embracedarrenhughes1 -
Christmas Music for SEO's
Hello On a lighter note just wondered what Christmas song's are the favorites of the SEO industry? One from each of us in our team: Fairytale of New York - The Pogues Santa Claus is Coming to Town - Jackson Five White Wine in the Sun - Tim Minchin Last Christmas - Wham! Christmas Wrapping - The Waitresses 🙂
Content Development | | highwayfive0 -
Is there a tool for measuring content freshness?
i.e. crawling a site to identify last date of new or changed content? Thanks.
Content Development | | PeterTroast0 -
Duplicat Website Content? (UK, Ireland)
Hi, My website is based in Ireland on a .ie domain & now I would like to enter the UK market on a .co.uk Is it ok for me to duplicate my .ie website and provide all the information on a .co.uk OR is this considered duplicate content in terms of Google. (I'm led to believe that your own content on my domain's is not considered duplicate & this is only considered duplicate content when you go from .com to .ie, .co.uk etc). (all content, images, branding are my own).
Content Development | | GlenBOB0