How to handle outdated, unoptimized blog posts receiving little or zero traffic?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 Some big visual updates are in the works, but currently I'm working on pruning and updating some poopy and outdated content.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
-
Blog On Company Website
I have a huge blog which is connected to a company website. This blog is full with dead links and spam comments. Is it worth to clean up? The website itself ranks very well in search engines. I'm amazed with all de spam that it still ranks. Do you think by removing all de dead links and spam the site will improve ranking in search results?
On-Page Optimization | | bill3690 -
Drop in Traffic
We recently went through a server upgrade, including SSL, Encryption, Browser Caching and Image Compression. Most articles I've read, state there will be a slight decrease in traffic shortly after launching before an increase from the normal volume. However, we launched over 3 weeks ago and our traffic has dropped consistently since. Question1: What would be an average length of time after implementing this type of update to rebound from the drop? Question 2: I follow Moz to the letter and have scores of 97 and 99 ,from the optimize a page section, for most of our product pages targeted keywords. What recommendations do you, my friends in the Moz Community, suggest we do next? TY in advance, you input is very valuable to me. KJr 7NSVm
On-Page Optimization | | KevnJr1 -
Htaccess redirect, from /year/month to /blog
I am trying to make some redirects so we don't lose that SEO juice. I am trying to move our blog structure from:
On-Page Optimization | | opiates
http://www.domain.com/2015/09/title-of-blog to:
http://www.domain.com/blog/title-of-blog I need to do redirects in htaccess from the old structure to the new structure but I can't seem to get it working properly. Here is what I have thus far. <code>RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.0-9)\/^(.0-9)\$ $1/ [R=301,L]</code> Any suggestions?0 -
I'm using Canonical URL but still receiving message - Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Hello, I checked my site and it looks like everything is setup correctly for canonical url but I keep getting the message that it's not. Am I doing something wrong? SORRY I FIGURED IT OUT! THANK YOU! HOW DO I DELETE THIS?
On-Page Optimization | | seohlp440 -
Exponentially Increasing Duplicate Content On Blogs
Most of the clients that I pick up are either new to SEO best practices, or have worked with sketchy SEO providers in the past, who did little more than build spammy links. Most of them have deployed little if any on-site SEO best practices, and early on I spend a lot of time fixing canonical and duplicate content issues alla 301 redirects. Using SEOMOZ, however, I see a lot of duplicate content issues with blogs that live on the sites I work on. With every new blog article we publish, more duplicate content builds up. I feel like duplicate content on blogs grows exponentially, because every time you write a blog article, it exists provisionally on the blog homepage, the article link, a category page, maybe a tag page, and an author page. I have a two-part question: Is duplicate content like this a problem for a blog -- and for the website that the blog lives on? Are search engines able to parse out that this isn't really duplicate content? If it is a problem, how would you go about solving it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Post Pinguin Onpage Optimisation - How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?
Hello, So far I always follow the recomendations of the chocolate donuts example of Rand Fishkin on the Blogpost: How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? I also think that the onpage grades follow this rules. Do you think this is still all true after pinguin? Personally none of my websites have been afected by the update and I have an A grade on all my landing page. What do you think about the image alt text. Is it still a good idea to use the keyword? Are there any newer resources here on SEOMOZ (I didn't find any with my search)? Thanks for sharing your experiences.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | stereo690 -
What is the best way to integrate our blog into our ecommerce website?
Hi all, We run an eCommerce website at www.oursite.com plus a blog (including news / articles / reviews / how-to guides etc.) at blog.oursite.com (those aren't really our site URLs, BTW ;-). For SEO reasons previously discussed on here, and for ease of use for our customers / browsers, we now want to integrate the two more closely. This will mean: Our blog will move to www.oursite.com/blog We will try to feature the blog content in places where it is relevant to customers (so e.g. news and blog posts about shoes would appear on our shoes category page, a review of some Adidas XL1000 shoes would appear on the Adidas XL1000 shoes product page) The blog is currently run on a wordpress.com site, so we'll need a new CMS (or wordpress.org) to get more control of the data. My issues are that, although it's good from a users point of view, having blog articles appear in lots of different places on the site might cause issues with duplicate content from a search engine's point of view. Has anyone got any pointers on how to integrate the two in a way that will make most use of the good original content coming out of our blog, while not "watering it down" by spreading it around too much? Can anyone point to examples of shops that do this well? Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using? As always, any help greatly appreciated! Alex
On-Page Optimization | | reddogmusic0 -
Using a more relevant brand title for blog
I'm a newbee here so I appologize in advance for asking a question that might already be aswered ( i looked I promise). The question is this, I've been fiddling with the title tags and came upon the need to make a decision about separating our blog brand to be more specific to it's content. We're a moving company, our primary website talks about services and is branded with our name (%page_name% | 2 Brothers Moving & Delivery Portland Oregon), our blog is a work in progress "Moving Guide" (%post_title% | Portland Moving Guide). Should I stick with the standard brand name on the blog or call it something keyword specific like above? As a side question what do you all think about my titles in the first place? In case you'd like to take a look: www.2brothersmoving.net www.2brothersmoving.net/blog
On-Page Optimization | | r1200gsa0