What to do with mismatched blog content?
-
I've maintained a blog on my website https://www.reich-consulting.net/ for quite a few years for my side business, which recently became my full-time gig. Since 2003 I worked as at IT Specialist at a technical school and I blogged about everything from tech support and IT issues to web design and development.
Now I'm a full-time web developer. I get a lots of traffic from some of these blog posts, but it doesn't seem to be useful traffic. For example someone whose searching for a solution to a super-specific windows error (one of my most popular posts) isn't going to be interested in hiring me for web development. Furthermore I have a concern that these pages might be doing a disservice to the primary message of the website, which is small business website design and web marketing. When I look at my top search terms in Google Search Console, these random terms from old blog entries are the top 30 terms... website design-related content doesn't even rate.
Any thoughts? Should I keep that content? Remove and 301 redirect it? Figure out a creative way to use it to my advantage?
-
There are 2 schools of thought here:
The pure old school SEO approach is to leave all of that content on the site so long as it meets some basic content quality requirements like length, non-duplication, etc. If those posts have a good number of inbound links (more than 5-10% of your link profile), then there's an even stronger argument to leave them there, and just publish some new content so that they go deeper into your archives.
I think that's a perfectly legitimate approach in this case, unless you're getting tons of annoying contact form submissions from people wanting help with problems you don't want to be involved with. That would be a good argument for removing these posts.
The second angle is the editorial content purist approach. This approach would say "traffic and links be damned, if it doesn't convey the intended message to your target audience, kill it." If your content was really off topic - like a gardening tutorial, I would recommend this route.
However - your content is related to IT and programming from what I can see - eg a post about Accessing Networking Settings in Windows XP. In my opinion, that type of content is still compelling to a small business owner who might hire you, because it's further proof that you're technically savvy. From that standpoint, I think you could make a good argument for leaving that content in place.
The final point is whether Google thinks your site is about SEO/web design, or about IT support. This is a legitimate concern. I would address it by simply adding a lot of new blog posts over the course of the year, entirely dedicated to web design and marketing. It's possible to "retrain" Google's understanding of what your site is about by doing this consistently enough. Here's a great post that I think would be a good tactic for you to pursue while retraining Google to understand your site's new purpose: http://www.anumhussain.com/presentations/topics-over-keywords.
-
In general, I think it's never a good idea to outright remove or delete a blog post - especially one that may actually be helpful to proper visitors. In this case, I'd suggest setting blog posts that disrupt your site's flow/funnel or otherwise cause this sort of issue to "no-index". Deindexing posts / pages like this will remove them from SERPs, but will leave them accessible to visitors. Don't be too heavy-handed with de-indexing though. Do this to one or a few posts, and see how that effects your site after a month. Then, if it's had a benefit, you could de-index more (not all) posts like this.
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
-
How to use long-tail keywords in my blog posts?
I'm using wordpress for my blog and yoast plugin for seo. recently i read a tutorial about "long-tail keyword" usage. but i get confused when i want to use them in my blog posts. take this long-tail keyword: best gaming mouse and keyboard for ps4 Imaging i want to use this as my primary keyword(focus keyword) in my blog post. how should i use it in post title and other parts of my article? -should i use it in the exact same order in my title or post?
Keyword Research | | jessica45
-how to use it in yoast keyphrase input? should i use exact match of the focus keyphrase in the input? as you know Google is capable of recognizing the separate words from longer search terms, even if the words are not in the exact same order as the query. I searched many days but unfortunately i couldn't find anything about how to use keyword or long-tail keyword inside the article step by step.0 -
Keywords and content query
Hi we are in the process of redesigning a web site and I’m looking to ensure each of the pages are correctly optimized. I’m concerned that some of the pages do not allow for text or content . From an optimization perspective is there a general rule around the amount of text a page should have and the amount/ration of keywords they should contain? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Keyword Research | | aplnzjune180 -
Blog - SEO Better? MyCompany.com/blog or marketing.MyCompany.com/blog? Percent difference?
We started blogging aggressively 3 months ago to bolster our organic search. We are building a new website and wonder if hosting our blog directly on our site is better than marketing.mycompnay.com? Is MyComanpany.com/blog a better choice - what percentage of SEO value would it be? We are building a new WordPress website. Our blog is currently hosted on a subdomain with HubSpot software. WILL OUR SEO BE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE EFFECTIVE HOST THE WEBSITE DIRECTLY OUR DOT COM? It won't be as convenient with HS tool but we want the best possible SEO.
Keyword Research | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Aiming for long tails on a long piece of content, without over-optimisation and attracting Panda...
Hi, I'm currently in the process of optimising a new ecommerce site with tons of content.
Keyword Research | | azu25
We're really well-researching our information and are aiming for one page a week, so each page (such as category pages etc) is getting 5-7 days of research before the content is written, so that we know our info is correct and that more than enough content is available, rather than a simple 300-500 word article.
One category page in particular has the potential for maybe 4,000-6,000 words, or even more (I don't want to hit that, as it's not needed, but I'd like to go into enough detail about enough things to bring us up on top as the market leader) - Our biggest competitor is currently hitting around 2,500 words on the category page for their site and they're ranking for a lot of long tails. (Of course they're also getting a lot of links too!)
To put it simply, we have a better quality product and a range of options (we're one of the first [if not the first] in the UK to have several options for this product where you have the choice of going for the cheap option, or going for higher priced and better quality options etc), whereas our main competitor simply has one stand alone product. By default this gives us much more to work with regarding potential content. While building this site we haven't bothered to consider 'keyword density', as we're going for as white-a-hat as possible, but when it comes to long tails I'm finding that I may have to consider it for this page at least.
We have a few dozen long tails such as 'Where does X come from', 'Why is X so expensive', 'What is the difference between X and X' etc - You know the kind of keywords.
To help specifically with the long tails we've opted to include a FAQ section to that category page, but it seems that by doing this I have accidentally gone up to ~3% density on the 'X', which I suppose isn't too bad, but at the same time that one keyword has already made ~30 appearances in the content - and all we have done so far is the FAQ section.
I'm going through now and rewording it so that it's less 'keywordy' (although there does seem to be a limit to the number of times to can say 'it' before that starts to sound odd..), but was just wondering how you manage to write a long and detailed piece of content that is all specifically about one thing, without having to use that one keyword too many times, while also hitting plenty of long tails at the same time?0 -
Looking for a recommended High Quality content creators, Recommendations?
Hi, I am looking for a recommended company which specializes in content creation to fluently create posts for our blog. This content needs to be of the highest quality. Areas of expertise - luxury goods, diamonds, diamond jewelry, fashion Any recommendations?
Keyword Research | | BeytzNet0 -
Partially Duplicated Content Advice
Hi Folks, I have a question about how duplicate content works. We sell all different kinds of goat milk soap. Each kind has its own product page and unique description. However, there are some benefits that all of the different soap have in common. I'd like to list those benefits on each individual goat milk soap page, with the product-specific benefits and description right below it. My questions are: 1. If I include the same exact block of text and images on each page, along with the unique description. Will the search engine see that as duplicate content? 2. Furthermore, will this dilute any keyword ranking ability that content brings to a page, because it occurs on 15 different pages? (i.e. the search engine can't tell which one is the "best" result). If so, what do you recommend in this kind of situation? Thanks, Hal
Keyword Research | | AlabuSkinCare1 -
Hit by Panda, what's the quickest way to remove content
One of our client's sites got hit by panda/penguin. after careful investigation we found that the site had 6,900 pages indexed out of which about 300 are actual pages (pages with quality content and add value to the user). Needless to say we had to remove all those pages. Most of the thin pages were on the blog section of the site so we removed the WP which was on www.mysite.com/blog/. My question is how can i speed up the process for Google to realize that i have taken all those this pages down. i have fetched the homepage and all linked pages via "Fetch as Google Bot" on WMT. is there anything else i can do to speed this up???
Keyword Research | | 858-SEO0 -
Is there really "keyword strategy" for sites with User Generated content? Any experiences?
I am starting website focused on consumer complaints/reviews with purely User Generated content. Is there really "keyword strategy" for such sites? I can only think of analyzing competition's keywords and understanding long tail http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-big-is-your-long-tail-whiteboard-friday. Any experiences? Or ideas?
Keyword Research | | ShoutOut0