Old pages - should I remove them from serps?
-
Hi guys,
I need an advice from you, a recommendation.
I have some old LPs from old campaigns, around 70 pages indexed on Google, campaigns that are not available anymore. I have removed them from my DB, but they still remained on server so Google still sees them as URLs on my site, witch I totally agree. What should I do with this pages?
Should I remove them completely? (url removal tool) or use rel=canonical?
How will this affect my domain authority and rankings?
This pages doesn't bring traffic any more, maybe a view now and then, but overall this pages don't bring traffic.
-
Since the campaigns are no longer available, I assume that these pages are no longer useful to the visitor. In which case, just put a note on the landing page that says "This offer is no longer available, but you might be interested in ...." In this case, the URLs remain in Google's index.
Alternatively, you can remove the pages from the server and 301-redirect each URL to your current campaign(s) if that seems more appropriate for the user. Because of the redirects, Google will eventually remove the URLs from their index.
In terms of SEO, the goal is not to lose any link equity coming from backlinks to those landing pages. If you simply use the URL removal tool, you'll lose any value from the backlinks. As Chris says, the canonical tag is relevant to duplicate content and not this type of situation.
-
-
Completely agree with Chris.
-
Landing pages
-
LPs??
-
Ask yourself "are they helpful for the user" if the answer is yes you should keep them, if no then remove them. Even if that theoretical user only comes for a visit rarely its still helpful to keep them about.
Canonical is only helpful if the content is the same if not its not the best option.
You may loose some authority if there are links pointing toward them but a 301 to a relevant resource may help avoid loosing this, you can check this in OSE etc. though.
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
-
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi I just got back from first crawl report and there were plenty of errors. I know this has been asked before but I am newbie here so bear with me. I captured the video. Any ideas on how to address the issue? ktXKDxRttK
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Removing some of the indexed pages from my website
I am planning to remove some of the webpages from my website and these webpages are already indexed with search engine. Is there any way by which I need to inform search engine that these pages are no more available.
Technical SEO | | ArtiKalra0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0