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
-
My website is penalized from google with no message in GWT.
On 26 of October 2018 My website have around 1 million pages indexed on google. but after hour when I checked my website was banned from google and all pages were removed. I checked my GWT and I did not receive any message. Can any one tell me what are the possible reasons and how can I recover my website? My website link is https://www.whoseno.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 29, 2018, 1:28 PM | WhoseNo0 -
What is the difference between Multilingual and multiregional websites?
Hi all, So, I have studied about multilingual and multiregional websites. As soon as possible, we will expand the website languages to english and spanish. The urls will be like this: http://example.com/pt-br
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 9, 2016, 9:38 PM | mobic
http://example.com/en-us
http://example.com/es-ar Thereby, the tags will be like this: Great! But my doubt is: To /es-ar/ The indexing will be only to spanish languages in Argentina? What about the other countries that speak the same language, like Spain, Mexico, etc.I don't know if it will be possible develop a Spanish languages especially for each region. Should I do an multiregional website or only multilingual? How Google sees this case? Thanks for any advice!!1 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 2, 2015, 2:34 PM | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
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 | Jun 28, 2013, 6:29 PM | 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 | Oct 3, 2013, 2:01 PM | PerfectPitchConcepts0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 29, 2013, 11:54 AM | BruLee0 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 28, 2012, 6:12 PM | Paul_Tovey0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 21, 2012, 11:38 AM | Hyrule0