What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?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
-
Content Creation For Blog & Ranking Locally
Hey Everyone, I'm trying to rank for specific long tail key words such as: lower back pain treatment exercises lower back surgery options herniated disc exercises and etc. My question is: If I create a blog or article on these key words and integrate content and video within it and on youtube, will these blog posts come up locally when someone searches it within my area?
Content Development | | backinmotion1231 -
Why should I avoid publishing off-topic content on my website?
As a fun project, my team wanted to build a mini-food blog based off the lunches we make here at our office -- but we're a software company and, topically, our product has nothing to do with food. Therefore, I suggested that we not publish this content on our website + create a Medium publication instead (this would also help us avoid the headache of creating an entirely new section of our website / potential 404 issues from non-technical editors / etc.) However, I struggled to articulate _why _it's a best practice to only publish relevant content on your website. Is it to help search engines understand what your website is about as an entity? Spam signals?
Content Development | | AsanaOps0 -
Free websites that are good for seo
I am looking to create some one phrase specific sites. Are there any free instant sites that are good for seo? I know WP but for speed wanted to go for an instant thing. http://wordpress.com/ ? or something else?
Content Development | | Agentmorris0 -
Content Architecture - Breakout Pages
If you have a page that summarizes four different product types adequately in a chart that requires no scroll, is there an SEO justification to also breaking out each product into a separate page, but basically it would contain the same information? The SEO in me says yes, because that's more crawlable content you can optimize, but wouldn't it go against usability and general common sense?
Content Development | | SSFCU0 -
One Page Website Blog Content Question
Hi guys, I'm new to the art of SEO and am learning every day from all the fantastic content here, I have a question that I can't find an answer to, hope it doesn't stump you like it has me... I have a one page website (www.neilwilliamsvoiceover.com) that I need to put more content on for SEO purposes but needs to be kept as one page. I've set-up a blog via blogger, and have that on the website but it's in iframe, which I've now discovered is ignored by search engines. So, my question is, is there a way to pull my blog feed into the website and have it recognised by search engines as content for the website? Would I use an RSS feed or feed burner or something else completely?! Thanks for your time and help in advance.
Content Development | | BamMK0 -
Duplicate Content From Huffington Post Blog
A client who writes blog posts for Huffington Post also wants an identical version of the blog posted to his personal site. Do you think there could be a problem of being punished for duplicate content? Would a better SEO practice be to have the client do an on-site blog just linking to the Huffington Post blog and providing information about it?
Content Development | | EmarketedTeam0 -
Promoting blog content
I've created a pinterest board, which kind of serves as a blog also as it tells people how they can save money on their heating bills this winter. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to promote it as a backlinking opportunity? Would it be good to also feature the content on our website? Guest blogging? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thank you.
Content Development | | AAttias0 -
Keeping web site fresh re content
We currently use a wp blog but we don not host on the web domain. What are the advanatges to moving the blog to the domain The only 1 I can think of is every time we update the blog this should help keep the web site fresh with new content .
Content Development | | NotThatFast0