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Thanks for the addition thoughts Mike. I'll check out that article and continue with the plan to see if these initial "test" redirects affect the site overall. I'll share my findings down the road...

Thanks Mike. I agree that this might not improve our SEO. But my hope is that it will at least clean up the site and make it more clear what we are about. So as we continue to acquire more links to the on-topic content, it will build a better SEO foundation for our long term success.

The other benefit is to get better clarity with our Analytics.

Right now, 75% of our business comes from non-Google sources (e.g. Pinterest, word of mouth). So I think the risk-reward scenario makes it worth a try. And I agree that we should start with a test and monitor. If no impact, then we'll redirect more of the content until it's all gone. And if there is an impact, then we can remove the redirects and just live with it, like we have been doing.

The blog is on the same domain as the store. The store has been running on this domain for a few years and is well-branded, so moving it to a new domain isn't an option. Over the past 1 1/2 years we have been writing on-topic blog posts. But we still get a ton of traffic into the older off-topic posts. Not only does this muck up our Google Analytics (because of all of the irrelevant traffic), I am also concerned that it is confusing Google as to what type of site were are. We don't get much value from the traffic to these off topic blog posts, so my thought is to move these pages to a new domain (with 301 redirects), or simply redirect them to another site that has similar content. Thoughts?

We launched a store on top of a popular blog. The blog had nothing to do with the store. The blog has a lot of backlinks and traffic, but our store is now our primary business. I am concerned that the off topic blog content may be affecting or ability to rank better for the core store business. Should we delete or redirect the old blog content to another website to improve the SEO for our store?

Hi Jeffrey,

We own and operate TrafficEstimate.com and can provide a little more insight into how it works.

We built an algorithm that attempts to estimate traffic based on various criteria. We calibrate the algorithm based on traffic from real websites, many of which we own and operate, and some that are owned by people that we are friendly with. It's hard to get the algorithm to match the exact traffic number for each of these sites, but we do get it close (often within 10% to 20%).

Like any estimating tool, TrafficEstimate.com tends to work best for larger sites. That's not to say you need millions of visitors, but for sites that have less than 20,000 visitors per month, it's really hard to be accurate, for any estimating tool.

In checking our own sites, it does appear to be running on the low side, so I'll have our team update it to get it to be more accurate, at least for our own sites. Hopefully that will translate into better results for you too.

If you (or anyone else) would like to share specific website/traffic data with me to help us calibrate it, feel free to reach out to me via private message (click on my profile). I promise that I'll keep all information confidential.

One final note about the sites we cover, we do track historical traffic (to provide year-over-year trending) for a large number of sites, but we don't cover all sites. We will work on adding the ability to get the current traffic estimate for any site, even if we don't cover it on an ongoing basis.

-Doug

We have a website that has run under the same domain name for the past 10 years. We have built up a decent amount of SEO "mojo" (and traffic) over time, however, the original domain name no longer applies to the business model.

A little over 1 year ago we started using a new brand name for the website and created a landing page for that domain name. Everything on that landing page links over to pages on the original domain name (to preserve the SEO value that we have built up over the years).

We would like to move all (or most) of the pages/content to the new domain name. Would using 301 redirects be the safest, most effective way of doing this? I have heard of other people doing it this way, and often they will see their traffic drop for a few weeks before it eventually comes back.

Anyone else had experience with this? What worked? What didn't?

Thanks!

We launched a store on top of a popular blog. The blog had nothing to do with the store. The blog has a lot of backlinks and traffic, but our store is now our primary business. I am concerned that the off topic blog content may be affecting or ability to rank better for the core store business. Should we delete or redirect the old blog content to another website to improve the SEO for our store?

Thanks Mike. I agree that this might not improve our SEO. But my hope is that it will at least clean up the site and make it more clear what we are about. So as we continue to acquire more links to the on-topic content, it will build a better SEO foundation for our long term success.

The other benefit is to get better clarity with our Analytics.

Right now, 75% of our business comes from non-Google sources (e.g. Pinterest, word of mouth). So I think the risk-reward scenario makes it worth a try. And I agree that we should start with a test and monitor. If no impact, then we'll redirect more of the content until it's all gone. And if there is an impact, then we can remove the redirects and just live with it, like we have been doing.