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However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore.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
-
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 -
Do you think its better to have a published date AND a last updated date ? Does google even look if you updated but left the published date old
Do you think its better to have a published date AND a last updated date on Posts ? Does google even look if you updated but left the published date old I was thinking of adding a "last updated" field to my articles. But is it worth it? or should I just keep it uncluttered and leave only the last published date? I would think that Google would not notice if I updated a last updated meta field since their is a published date field already.
Content Development | | ianizaguirre1 -
Content Writing Service Recommendations
I am looking to hire a content writer for our sites. Anyone familiar with a service where the manage the content on your site? Basically, come up with topics & content ideas, then writing the content. Please give me an idea of the pricing if possible. Greatly appreciate any help.
Content Development | | inhouseseo0 -
Ideas for content
Where do you get your ideas to create content for a blog? I have been using the new keyword planner and am not coming up with any ideas. We are an e-commerce site that deals with commercial equipment. It is hard for me to show anything interesting with products because the company does not own it.
Content Development | | EcommerceSite0 -
Duplicate listings content
I've been listing our business on various business and wedding directories most of which require a short description of the business. I've written up a "boilerplate" description which is fairly similar to one we have on the site. If I use this content on multiple listings sites will it cause me issues with google seeing it as duplicate content and finding it difficult to decide which pages to rank?Most of these sites are supplier directories so I don't expect people to site search them for our business they are much more likely to browse categories but will it affect organic results for our actual website? Should I be writing a different piece of copy for each listing which requires a company description to avoid any issues?
Content Development | | EdoubleD
Any help is greatly appreciated!!!0 -
Using syndicated content / videos
Hi all, We are looking at using some syndicated video content on our main category pages. We are an pharmacy and offer prescription medicines (Yes we are NHS registered and no we don't sell generic products). I want to use the videos to increase the UX for the category pages and increase stickiness......however i am a little worried about how Google will see this. We don't have the time or budget to create our own videos but the rest of the content around them is all ours. The videos are provided by the NHS so they are good quality content and should add value to the consumer. Will big G stiff us for doing this?
Content Development | | nicc19760 -
Do comments count as page content, as it relates to the length of content on a page?
I understand Google likes long content, and I make all my pages at least 500 words of unique and good content. But there is something I am curious about. Do they also count comments as content? The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering creating a Q&A site, where I'd control the questions, making sure they would be good ones and not duplicates, and then have people add answers. In reality, I'd be populating most the questions as first, and most definitely supplying a very good and long answer to questions. The answers would likely be in the form of comments, with highest ranked answers at top. So, I'm wondering what Google would think of a 100 word question, with a several hundred word answer in a comment, often followed by some other comments after that. Would it be a 100 word page or a 500+ word page?
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
How to organize content for ecommerce site
Hello, We've decided to create 24 articles of content for our ecommerce site, everything from an FAQ to history of the products to 10 articles on the top 10 products. Really useful to the user. How do you suggest that we make our content visible to the users? We could put a nice button on our right banner that says "Extensive Help Session" or we could put a banner on our home page or we could make it a tab at the top of the screen. We could additionally make a well organized footer with links to the articles. Or we could do all of those but that might be overkill. What do you suggest?
Content Development | | BobGW0