How best to approach archiving badly optimised content
-
I signed up SEO Moz about a month ago as i'm currently rebuilding my site from scratch and wanted to learn from current mistakes.
At present I use the forum software Invision Power Board to manage my site and one thing i've learnt is that it is terrible for SEO, there are so many thousands of errors listed by the crawler that it's not even worth trying to fix it.
However because it has 5 or 6 years worth of content alot of which is on Google I don't want to totally remove it, rather I would prefer to archive it of with a big banner at the top letting anybody that visits it know that it's no longer in use and pointing them to the frontpage.
I should note that it is in a subfolder already so the location of any of the links won't be changed.
So the few questions I have are:
- The forum index has alot of link juice and I would like to redirect that to the new forum index, however for archive purposes the old index still needs to be accessible.
- Some topics are very popular and appear high in Google and have alot of backlinks. The important information in these forum topics will be available elsewhere on the new rebuilt site. Again I would like to redirect both link juice and users to the new page, however being a forum topic there are tens or hundreds of pages of old comments that need to still be accessible for reference.
- There are bound to be duplicate meta title and description issues with new similarly named categories appearing both on the new site and the old forum, is this going to be that much of a problem?
So really what i'm asking is, how should I go about archiving this of without destroying content and rankings, but still making sure that the new stuff is getting the right exposure both to users and search engines alike?
-
hmm that's very interesting, i've had another look at the stats to give more insight.
150,000 visitors hit the forums from search engines every month, of these only 10 landing pages get over 1000 visitors and 168 get over 100. This amounts to 76,000 visits or roughly half.
The other half comes from visits to a whopping 16,222 different landing pages.
So whilst manually redirecting those 168 may be a manageable task it would mean the loss of half of the visitors the forums pull in.
It also doesn't deal with the problem with letting users still browse the old content whilst transferring the link juice to newer areas, since Search Engines would not take kindly to being treated differently to an actual user.
-
We have a blog that gets about 2000 to 3000 short posts per year. Most of those posts have a temporary value and have very little archive value.
The posts are filed in folders by year such as /blog/2010/ .
Once a year we run analytics to identify old posts that pull in significant traffic or old posts that have valuable links. Where possible we create a new page of evergreen content on the same subject and 301 redirect those posts.
All posts that receive very little traffic are considered to be "dead weight" on our site. We delete those posts and redirect the entire folder to the homepage of the blog with an .htaccess file at /blog/2010/.htaccess. This also reduces the size of our database.
With a forum, you might be able to delete some of the worthless material and feature some of the archival gold.
-
Thanks for the response you're right it is not a simple problem, but i'm hoping people on this forum may be able to provide some very useful tips or advice from past experience, i'm sure many will have had to tackle this sort of dilemma before.
Just looked at some stats which demonstrate it's importance, 51.76% of visits come from Google and land on the forum currently.
Given that stat it may seem ludicrous to want to change the site so drastically but as you can imagine having everything managed on a forum can become very messy compared to a custom coded site where every page and content type is tailored to its specific needs and of course keeping the urls is not going to be an option when it's all tied into "topic ids".
-
I don't think that this is a simple problem.
A good diagnosis should be considering historic traffic information, past and potential linkage structure, keywords, external links, premium content vs worthless content, usability and more.
If this forum is low value it maybe be best just redirecting everything.
However, if there is a lot of value there I would want to put some careful consideration and planning into the solution. Certainly more than the five-minute-look that most visitors to a Q&A forum are able to provide.
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
-
Duplicate Content
I run a Business Directory, Where all the businesses are listed. I am having an issue.. with Duplication content. I have categories, Like A, B, C Now a business in Category A, User can filter it by different locations, by State, City, Area So If they filter it by the State and the State has 10 businesses and all of them are in one City. Both of the page
On-Page Optimization | | Adnan4SEO
The state filtered and the city filtered are same, What can i do to avoid that? canonical-url-tag or changing page Meta's and Body text? Please help 🙂0 -
Product Attribute pages and Duplicate content
Hiya I have two queries is about a jewellery shop running on wordpress and woocommerce. 1. I am a little indecisive on how to index the product categories without creating duplicate pages which will get me into trouble. For example: All earrings are listed on the category page: chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ We also have product attribute pages which lists all the subcategories for the earrings: chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/creoles/
On-Page Optimization | | bongoheads
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/drop/
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/studs/ I have the category URL and the product attribute URLs set to be indexed on my sitemaps. Will this get me into trouble creating duplicate content with the main category page? Should I only have the main category indexed and "no-index, follow" all the product attribute pages? 2. I am also thinking about incorporating these product attribute URLS into my menu so when people hover over earrings they get shown the types of earrings they can buy. However, I have the woocommerce faceted navigation working on the category pages. So if someone is visiting the page chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ The user can click on the left hand side, and select "drops". The URL they will get though is one which is not indexed: http://www.chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/?filter_earrings=123 Can I link to those product attribute pages without the risk of getting accused of creating duplicate content? Thank you for your help. Carolina0 -
"Turning off" content to a site
One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar? This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind: “Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.” What are your thoughts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour0 -
Onpage Optimisation
Hi Guys, Has anyone noticed that the onpage rules seem to have changed in terms of what Google is looking for. I have just been optimizing a client site, I haven't worked on for a year and noticed that the pages I have worked on have dropped since lat week when I finished the onpage. Some of them aren't just 1 or 2 places but literally pages. It can't be links as I haven't even started link building yet. These are the same rules i have been playing with for six years and I don't cut corners with rogue text, or overly optimize for keywords. I am going to give it till the end of the month and then reverse the changes be interesting to see what happens. Kind Regards Neil
On-Page Optimization | | nezona0 -
Internal linking best practice
See example: car rental - sedans - bmw car rental - sedans - audi car rental - sedans - ford (internal links to sedans - audi, ford) or (internal links to suv - bmw) car rental - suv - bmw car rental - suv - audi car rental - suv - ford (internal links to suv- audi, ford) or (internal links to sedans- bmw...) Should I cross link only between the product page under each category or can I link between different products under different categories? From a user point of view, I think it will give him more options if he wants to choose the same brand but a bigger vehicle although I have read numerous posts saying that we should be internally linking most of the time within the same category. User experience or SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | echo10 -
What is the best practice for optimizing international websites? We operate a .co.uk and .com and obviously content is similar.
We have two (and soon to be more) international websites, all in English. The sites in question are WebHostingBuzz.com and WebHostingBuzz.co.uk. Obviously content is similar as we're providing a similar service but from different locations and different prices. What is best practice here? Should we completely re-write the .co.uk content (this is the newer site) so it isn't penalized for scraping? Any hints/tips would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | mdrussell0 -
How to "rich-content" optimized!
Hi mozzers! How to optimize really a rich index.php of a page,with a keyword example: " mobile " what kind of things to include,video,comments,images,how many words,manually meta-descriptons or to leave it empty to take automatically the googlebot a snippet! Tell us more on this, because we forget sometimes the rich-content-optimized and only concentrated on the link-building. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | leadsprofi0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0