How to handle outdated, unoptimized blog posts receiving little or zero traffic?
-
I'm doing some overdue spring cleaning on our WP blog. Some big visual updates are in the works, but currently I'm working on pruning and updating some poopy and outdated content. Many of the older posts weren't written with SEO in mind and were posted to the blog merely as an extension of our monthly enewsletter.
Here's an example: http://pq.systems/2FkQyVG
This post needs a lot of work to meet our new standards. The content is thin, readability is weak, kw targetting is non-existant, the visuals suck, zero links, and the charting software mentioned has since been replaced with another solution that we are currently promoting.
There are quite a few other posts with similar issues...
Any thoughts on the best way to handle these posts?
From poking around similar Q&A threads, it seems my options are:
- Create new updated post, remove old post, 301 redirect from old to new
- Create new updated post, add blurb & link pointing to new post at the top of old post
- Edit/update old post, add "This post was updated....etc" blurb to top of old post
Any other options or opinions on which solution I should go with would be much appreciated!
-
Good news is that after I did the same tedious process myself, my SEO results went up!
-
Glad that it was helpful!
-
Thanks for the response Lydia! It's tedious, but the process you described is exactly what I ended up trying (https://www.screencast.com/t/ujdst1UxEpqK). Great to know I'm on the right track before continuing to audit 400+ pages one-by-one
-
Hey Sam!
I would try to sort these posts into categories like "posts that could be useful for SEO", "posts that have backlinks but I do not want to keep", and "posts that are of no use at all". For the ones that could be useful I would try to figure out a way to re-target them to make them more useful (since they are not getting traffic at the moment). For the posts that have backlinks, you can pass their link equity by 301 redirecting them to a similar post if you do not want to keep it around. For posts that don't have backlinks and you don't want to keep, simply adding a noindex tag may be your best best to keep it out of the index and from competing with other pages on your site for rankings.
Obviously, each site cleanup has a unique situation and this may not fit in with yours, I am totally open to discussion on this as there is not a definitive "right" answer.
Have a great day!
Lydia
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
-
Internal Website Linking from Syndicated Blog Posts
Does it help, hurt, or do nothing for my website's SEO if I do internal linking from syndicated blog posts (on my blog) to my website pages? For example, a syndicated blog post on winterizing your house has instances of "homeowners insurance" linking to my webpage on homeowners insurance. Proper canonicalization is done as well.
On-Page Optimization | | BFMichael0 -
What is the perfect way to handle multiple sitemaps index in Search Console?
Hello friends, I have this doubt for a long and i want to share it with you. In our agency many clients have a PHP template for the home page of their sites, and also have a blog with wordpress as CMS. When i am optimizing sitemaps, I have two separate files, an index of Sitemaps created with Wordpress SEO by Yoast (which inside has separate Sitemaps tags, categories, posts, pages, authors, etc.) and on the other hand the home page sitemap with the subsections. As you know the sitemap generated by "Wordpress SEO by Yoast" is dynamic as it creates the sitemap according to current site content, and is updated every time a new entry is raised or modify any URL. This makes it very practical. I can not have a unique index sitemap sitemaps nesting inside another, as it is not allowed by Google or Sitemap protocol. I read in the Google Support you can upload multiple sitemaps to Search Console but does not say anywhere on upload multiple sitemaps index, or a combination thereof. In my case, I would have to upload two separately files, the dynamically generated with wordpress and the manual created for the PHP template. In my opinion there is no problem and Google will index everything properly performing it this way, but I wanted to share it with you to see how you solve this problem and what experiences had. Thanks and best regards.
On-Page Optimization | | NachoRetta1 -
No links or traffic to our articles
Hello, Our articles are written by a professional in the field, taylored to what we think our ecommerce customers would most want to know about. But there is no traffic to our articles and almost no inbound links. We have 15 articles around 500 words (roughly) each. We've got a right sidebar banner about our FAQ and articles and a rotating banner with one slde about our articles. Also, we have a tab at the top. We've had a good article section for 5 months, and a descent one for a couple of years Could it be our industry, or what can we do?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Detecting SE traffic on a landing page
Hi all, I am trying to optimize our landing pages in order to getting new visitors to make an action instead of leaving. But in order to so, I need to be able to identify when a user comes from a Google search and when a user does not. Can anyone help me? The site is written in PHP. Best regards, Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Is it a good idea to rel=canonical dozens of old outdated pages?
we have dozens old outdated manual pages that still need to be up, but have terrible code issues (they're exported from word) and no image tagging, etc. there are new pages in place, so should i rel=canonical to the new pages? will this transfer any link juice to the newer, more seo-friendly ones?
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880 -
Should I use my blog posts in a sub folder
Ok I did a search and didn't see an answer to this exact question. Most of them were about if a blog should be in a sub folder and not the blog posts themselves... so here it goes. I have a blog on my website the blog itself is in /blog/ but the blog posts themselves are situated in the root folder so it looks something like mydomain.com/cool-seo-blog-post/ Is there any reason I should change this and make it read mydomain.com/blog/cool-seo-blog-post/
On-Page Optimization | | jaybrn10 -
How woud you deal with Blog TAGS & CATEGORY listings that are marked a 'duplicate content' in SEOmoz campaign reports?
We're seeing "Duplicate Content" warnings / errors in some of our clients' sites for blog / event calendar tags and category listings. For example the link to http://www.aavawhistlerhotel.com/news/?category=1098 provides all event listings tagged to the category "Whistler Events". The Meta Title and Meta Description for the "Whistler Events" category is the same as another other category listing. We use Umbraco, a .NET CMS, and we're working on adding some custom programming within Umbraco to develop a unique Meta Title and Meta Description for each page using the tag and/or category and post date in each Meta field to make it more "unique". But my question is .... in the REAL WORLD will taking the time to create this programming really positively impact our overall site performance? I understand that while Google, BING, etc are constantly tweaking their algorithms as of now having duplicate content primarily means that this content won't get indexed and there won't be any really 'fatal' penalties for having this content on our site. If we don't find a way to generate unique Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions we could 'no-follow' these links (for tag and category pages) or just not use these within our blogs. I am confused about this. Any insight others have about this and recommendations on what action you would take is greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0