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.
Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?
-
So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out. One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant. None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues. Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better.
So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts.
What do you guys think?
-
You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that:
http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/
-
It depends on what you mean by "remove."
If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?
Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.
When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.
Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).
This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.
To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."
Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.
-
we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.
Wow.... it is great to hear someone looking at their content and deciding that he can kick it up a notch. I have seen a lot of people would never, ever, pull the kill switch on an old blog post. In fact they are still out there hiring people to write stuff that is really crappy.
If this was my site I would first check to be sure that I don't have a penguin or unnatural links problem. If you think you are OK there, here is what I would do.
-
I would look at those blog posts to see if any of them have any traffic, link or revenue value. Value is defined as... A) Traffic from any search engine or other quality source, B) valuable links, C) viewing by current website visitors, D) traffic who enter through those pages making any income through ads or purchases.
-
If any of them pass the value test above then I would improve that page. I would put a nice amount of work into that page.
-
Next I would look at each of those blog posts and see if any have content value. That means an idea that could be developed into valuable content... or valuable content that could be simply rewritten to a higher standard. Valuable content is defined as a topic that might pull traffic from search or be consumed by current site visitors.
-
If any pass the valuable content test then I would improve them. I would make them kickass.
-
After you have done the above, I would pull the plug on everything else.... or if I was feeling charitable I would offer them to a competitor.
Salutes to you for having the courage to clean some slates.
-
-
I would run them through Copyscape to check for plagiarism/duplicate content issues. After that, I would check for referral traffic. If there are some pages that draw enough traffic, you might not want to remove them. Finally, round it off with a page level link audit. Majestic can give you a pretty good idea of where they stand.
The pages that don't make the cut should be set to throw 410 status codes. If you still don't like the content on pages with good links and/or referral traffic, 301 those to better content on the same subject.
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
-
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
Two blogs on a single domain?
Hi guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
How does Google know if a backlink is good or not?
Hi, What does Google look at when assessing a backlink? How important is it to get a backlink from a website with relevant content? Ex: 1. Domain/Page Auth 80, website is not relevant. Does not use any of the words in your target term in any area of the website. 2. Domain/Page Auth 40, website is relevant. Uses the words in your target term multiple times across website. Which website example would benefit your SERP's more if you gained a backlink? (and if you can say, how much more would it benefit - low, medium, high).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
What should be done with old news articles?
Hello, We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-nameMy question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0