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However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore.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
-
Blog post generating irrelevant traffic. What should I do with it?
I have a blog post that has been generating more than 75% of my website's traffic month over month.-averaging about 1000 views a month. Awesome that so many people are finding and benefiting from this post, however it is really skewing my traffic. I have an 87% bounce rate, and I'm only ranking in terms related to this post as opposed to industry related terms. I'm not sure what to do with this blog post. I want to be able to better evaluate my website's performance and be sure I'm targeting the right audience in order to gain more leads. Would a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' be appropriate here? Thanks!
Content Development | | Ali_DeLeg0 -
Sudden drop in traffic in April and stagnant since then
Hi, I am the editor at a travel website based in Singapore (www.tripzilla.com). In mid April, we suffered a drop out of the blue and in total, it was a 20% drop overall. We post about 2-3 new articles a day, and we do research our keywords. I have also been updating our older ranking articles but seems like it's not really working. In May, we only received a .50% growth 😞 I have to bring it back to speed, and I really dont understand the decline, since the "formula" of our postings has been the same since I joined the company a year ago. Please help thank you! onjn7UV
Content Development | | mousepad881 -
Internal blog with history and some SEO value versus new external blogs with specialized content?
We operate a blog inside a folder on our site and considering the launch of 4 highly focused blogs with specialized content which are now categories on the internal blog. Wondering if there is more value in using the external new blogs or just keep growing the internal blog content. Does fact that the internal blog is buried amongst millions of pages have any impact if we want the content indexed and value given to the links from the blog content to our main site pages.
Content Development | | CondoRich0 -
Content Writing - it should be for the main corporate site, blog or for social media?
Hi There, I have my main site : example.com and a related blog https://blog.example.com/ My management does not believe frequent content posting on the example.com My Queries 1- Will it help boost ranking of **example.com **if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has? 2- Every body says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help. 3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it? Hope somebody will enligten me caught in catch 22. Regards Tanveer
Content Development | | Sequelmed1 -
Free Duplicate Content Checker Tools ?
Hi Moz, I am really looking for free tools which can carry my content duplication issue, as i visited http://moz.com/community/q/are-there-tools-to-discover-duplicate-content-issues-with-the-other-websites suggested copyscape which is paid. I want FREE to handle my duplication issue.' Thanks in Advance. Best,
Content Development | | Futura
Teginder1 -
Duplicate Content behind a Paywall
We have a website that is publicly visible. This website has content. We'd like to take that same content, put it on another website, behind a paywall. Since Google will not be able to crawl those pages behind the paywall is there any risk to ua doing this? Thanks! Mike
Content Development | | FOTF_DigitalMarketing0 -
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 -
Onsite Content - Word Count & KW Density
Does the word count of a webpage make a difference to search engines? Are longer word counts on pages indexed higher or given higher priority? For example,say you have 300 words of copy packed with 20 keywords, and say you also have 700 words of copy that have the same 20 keywords worked in, does Google have a preference over which one it ranks higher?
Content Development | | greentent0