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What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?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.
-
You are welcome!
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
Thank you very much for your reply. This is exactly what I've done - I decided to delete all these irrelevant blog posts from our website and assigned a 410 status to them with custom page for users who land on any of these pages to make the user experience a little bit better.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my question
Alex
-
Hi there,
I would only keep the content that is related to the business unless you are getting a lot of traffic from these articles that are not related to heating systems and gas cylinders. Getting traffic it is always good to show Google that your site is interested enough to get visitors. If you decide to remove these blog posts, I would check if any of these irrelevant posts have any backlinks before you remove them. If they do have some links should try to redirect them to relevant pages that you would on your site or just keep them because of the high-quality links. It is a good idea to set up these deleted pages to 410 ( Page Gone) so Google will remove from the index much faster.
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
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
Breaking a Big Website into Multiple Unrelated Sites
I have a big cluttered website that I want to simplify. There is content for patients, researchers, therapists who are looking for grants, etc.. Would it be a bad ideas to turn these into 3 or more, completely different sites with each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better? Thanks for your help!!!
Content Development | | bosleypalmer0 -
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 -
Is there a way to repost content (with permission) to another site without being penalized by Google?
I write a monthly Social Media Marketing column for a local Business Journal and the column is printed in their paper as well as posted on their website. Is there any way I can repost these articles on my website's blog without being penalized by Google for "duplicate content"?
Content Development | | vyki0 -
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