Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey all,

So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing  thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired.

After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url.

My question is: are these 404's normal?

Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these?

Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file?

Are these 404's going to hurt my blog?

Thanks,

Roman

Hey all,

So I checked out "The What, Why, and How of Pruning Your Website for SEO" and recently read ahrefs well known article on seo strategy and both really focused on the idea of removing poorly performing pages on your site for an SEO boost.

I've asked this question in a few different ways before but I was hoping to get some more insight into this.

If my company's blog has thousands of posts going back 5 years, 99% of which only really had pageviews on the day of their release and then after that receive no traffic, direct or organic, am I better off getting rid of (301) 99% of these posts and only sticking to/improving important/performant posts?

Does anyone know how other blogs/sites deal with these sorts of issues. Where one function of the blog is to provide informative articles and the other function to post little tidbits (with barely any copy and rapid relevancy decay rate) meant to promote interaction with the blog community (like polls or one line contest winner announcements).

Is this an issue of misusing the blog? For example, should the blog just be used for articles and all contests etc. be moved to social media?

Thanks in advance for your insights,

Roman

Hey all,

So I found a domain that GWT tells me has 23k links pointing to a landing page. I found that the link is part of their global nav as a text ad and that's why it's probably registering so many links. The site has a DA of 56, is this a bad thing? Could it be hurting the rest of my site's ability to rank?

Thanks,

Roman

Patrick,

Thank you for your response. I was hoping I could also get some input from you. So we're going to up our efforts for getting positive reviews. I was curious to know if you had any insight into what's acceptable practice and what isn't. For example:

1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask?

2. Which medium is generally most successful? Email, twitter, facebook

3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.)

4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?

5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position?

Thanks again for your help!

Roman

Logan,

Thanks for your response. So we're going to up our efforts for getting positive reviews. I was curious to know if you had any insight into what's acceptable practice and what isn't. For example:

1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask?

2. Which medium is generally most successful? Email, twitter, facebook

3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.)

4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?

5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position?

Thanks again for your help!

Roman

Hey all,

So when googling the name of our site we see consumer affairs pop up around 5th with a 1 star rating. These negative reviews are mostly spammy (competitors, etc.) since we have an awesome support team that deals with all unhappy members very effectively. We reached out to CA and they came back asking for $10k+ (highway robbery) to "help us improve our rating."

My question is: do poor ratings on review sites like these negatively affect your SERPs? And if so, how can we work to combat their effect?

Thanks in advance,

Roman

Hola all,

So I'm having an issue where I have two important pages (homepage and page that lists products) that seemingly take turns ranking for an important keyword phrase. One day the homepage is in the top 20, one day the other, one day neither. And it's gone on like this for a couple of months. Both are optimized for keyword phrases that contain a shorter keyword phrase. So for example, let's say the homepage is optimized for: "Get paid to take polls" and the other page is optimized for "Earn cash for paid polls and more." Both contain: "paid polls."

Is there cannibalization happening here?

Should I completely remove "paid polls" from one keyword phrase?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Roman

Trenton,

We actually solved the issue. It had something to do with a bad wordpress plugin.

Thanks for your time,

Roman

Hey all,

Was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue. Bing is showing title and description tags missing in the head of my wordpress blog. I can't seem to find any documentation on this.

Thanks,

Roman

Hello all,

I came across a tip for avoiding text orphans in responsive design by putting a non-breaking space between the last two words. While this works nicely, I was wondering if I did this inside of a keyword phrase, would it still rank equally as well? Or will it be viewed as separate phrases or terms?

Thanks,

Roman

Thomas,

Most of these pages have no backlinks and contain dated information. Would you still noindex vs delete the pages?

Thanks,

Roman

Hey all,

When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)?

My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant?

Thanks in advance,

Roman

John,

Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly.

1. Are you suggesting that getting crawl issues to 0 should be my main priority?

2. I was under the impression that obvious use of keywords in anchor text is an easy way of getting penalized by google's algorithm. Is that not true?

3. By "target articles" do you mean guest blog posts on other sites or on my own blog.

Thanks again for further input!

Roman

Hey John,

Thanks so much for your response.

1. Technical SEO, I have spent a good deal of time working on the technical side of things. We do have remaining issues but our site has a lot of pages, especially on the blog (subdomain) and it would take a very long time to get all of them fixed (issues like long page names and duplicate descriptions). But I have fixed duplicate content, 301 to single url, etc. Speed-wise we're ok (64/100 perf grade & 2.5 Load time on pingdom).

2. Backlinks-wise, we're not in terrible shape. 35 DA and 41 PA (homepage). And while many of our competitors are much stronger than us authority-wise, I've seen some with lower numbers that rank higher for some keyword phrases.

3. Content. I have recently started up an initiative for creating more relevant content on the blog with a focus on creating sharable content to earn us some social links and attempt to build some potential marketing relationships. Although we're still in the very early stages on that front (lots of growing pains).

I have to say I've probably watched and read almost every video in the moz academy and read a ton of articles elsewhere, including most of what Matt Cutts has put out there. It feels like I've followed all the right advice from the pros but I'm not seeing that big jump I've been dying to wake up to! Taking all of this into account, what would you advise?

Thanks,

Roman

Also, if anyone else has any advice I would really appreciate the help!

I have a few keyword phrases I've been trying to rank in the top 20 for (starting place). I have optimized for a few different phrases, ranging in keyword difficulty, but no matter what I do I can't seem to get in. In many cases, the exact same results show up for many different variations of the phrases I'd like to rank for. I've read about how google tries to match user intent and so if it decides those results are more relevant then it will always show them, but does that mean that no matter what I do I will always be behind them?

The main question I have is: how should I proceed? Should I stop optimizing pages and focus on link acquisition? Or go through and make sure there isn't a single crawl issue? Or focus on optimizing for longer tail keyword phrases?

It just feels like I've done so much of what the moz tools have recommended and I'm seeing very little movement over the past couple of months, if anything I see dips in performance after optimization.

Thanks in advance!