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.
Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?
-
I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/
It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings.
When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve.
I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website?
Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.
-
This is a very valid question, in my opinion, and one that I have thought about a lot. I even did it on a site before on a UGC section where there were about 30k empty questions, many of which were a reputation nightmare for the site. We used the parameters of:
- Over a year old
- Has not received an organic visit in the past year
We 410d all of them as they did not have any inbound links and we just wanted them out of the index. I believe they were later 301d, and that section of the site has now been killed off.
Directly after the pages were removed, we saw a lift of ~20% in organic traffic to that section of the site. That maintained, and over time that section of the site started getting more visits from organic as well.
I saw it as a win and went through with it because:
- They were low quality
- They already didn't receive traffic
- By removing them, we'd get more pages that we wanted crawled, crawled.
I think Gary's answer of "create more high quality content" is too simplistic. Yes, keep moving forward in the direction you are, but if you have the time or can hire someone else to do it, and those pages are not getting traffic, then I'd say remove them. If they are getting traffic, maybe do a test of going back and making them high quality to see if they drive more traffic.
Good luck!
-
Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.
Things not addressed in that thread:
- If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
- The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
- Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
- The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.
-
Haha I read this question earlier, saw the post come across feedly and knew what I needed to do with it. Just a matter of minutes.
You're right though - I would've probably said remove earlier as well. It's a toss up but usually when they clarify, I try to follow. (Sometimes they talk nonsense of course, but you just have to filter that out.)
-
Just pipped me to it
-
Hi Xpers.
I was reading a very timely, if not the same issue article today from Barry Schwartz over at SEO Round Table. He has been following a conversation from Gary Illyes at Google, whom apparently does not recommend removing content from a site to help you recover from a Panda issue, but rather recommends increasing the number of higher quality pages etc.
If you are continuing to get more traffic by adding your new larger higher quality articles, I would simply continue in the same vein. There is no reason why you cannot still continue to share your content on social platforms too.
In the past I may have suggested removing some thin/outsdated content and repointing to a newer more relevant piece, but in light of this article I now may start to think a tad differently. Hopefully some of the other Mozzers might have more thoughts on Barry's post too.
Here is the article fresh off the press today - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html
-
Google's Gary Illyes basically just answered this on Twitter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html
"We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff"
So rather than spend a lot of time on old work, move forward and improve. If there's terrible stuff, I'd of course remove it. But if it's just not super-high quality, I would do as Gary says in this instance and work on new things.
Truthfully, getting Google to recrawl year or two or five stuff can be tough. If they don't recrawl it you don't even get the benefit until they do, if there were a benefit. Moving forward seems to make more sense to me.
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
-
Guest Post - What to reply when blogger ask for $$ to post a content?
Guest Post - What to reply when blogger ask for $$ to post a content? I did not want to pay $$ to post guest post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Why does Moz recommend subdomains for language-specific websites?
In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
My website is not ranking for primary keywords in Google
I need help regarding some SEO strategy that need to be implemented to my website http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 . My website is a leading live chat product, daily it receives around 2000 unique visitors. Initially the website was impacted by manual link penalty, I cleaned up lot of backlinks, the website revoked from the penalty some where around June'14. Most of the secondary and longtail Keywords started ranking in Google, but unfortunately, it do not rank well for the primary keywords like (live chat, live chat software, helpdesk etc). Since I have done lot of onsite changes and even revamped the content but till now I dont find any improvement. I am unable to understand where I have got structed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk
can anyone help me out?0 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Posting same video on both Vimeo and Youtube
A client likes the control of Vimeo Pro for embedding videos on site, but for search purposes would like to create a YouTube channel with the same videos, perhaps with altered titles and descriptions. This is the same video content in two places - will we run into duplicate content issues? Thank you, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerfectPitchConcepts0