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.
What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?
-
Hi everyone,
On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients.
Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed.
I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do?
Thank you very much in advance.
-
You are welcome!
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
Thank you very much for your reply. This is exactly what I've done - I decided to delete all these irrelevant blog posts from our website and assigned a 410 status to them with custom page for users who land on any of these pages to make the user experience a little bit better.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my question
Alex
-
Hi there,
I would only keep the content that is related to the business unless you are getting a lot of traffic from these articles that are not related to heating systems and gas cylinders. Getting traffic it is always good to show Google that your site is interested enough to get visitors. If you decide to remove these blog posts, I would check if any of these irrelevant posts have any backlinks before you remove them. If they do have some links should try to redirect them to relevant pages that you would on your site or just keep them because of the high-quality links. It is a good idea to set up these deleted pages to 410 ( Page Gone) so Google will remove from the index much faster.
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 deal with lot of old content that doesn't drive traffic - delete?
Hi community, i hope someone can help me with this, We are migrating our e-commerce site next februari. I'm preparing the content migration. For a large part exact copies of our product listing and product detail pages will be migrated.
Content Development | | Marketing-Omoda
However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore. It actually is just worthless content. (Not only as a traffic driver, this also counts for extremely low to none internal driven traffic (both internal search and internal navigation). We have about 4.000+ blogs of which about 100 drive the most traffic (mostly incited by e-mail and social campaigns and internal navigation promoted on important category landing pages during some period. Is it a bad signal to search engines to delete these old content pages? I.a.: going from a content-rich to a content-poor site?
Off course I will migrate the top 100 traffic earning content and provide proper redirects to them0 -
How much should I pay for one hour of content creation work?
Hi I have recently been looking for some new content creators to work with. And I recently asked a blogger that I know of how much he would charge for some content creations. I told him that I'm looking for some good compelling content that is about 400 to 500 words. And he told me that he would charge $180 an hour. I sorta feel like that's a bit to much, but I don't want to jump to conclusions without any advice from you all. I'm very well versed in my SEO and do most of the work for my site. But I think a fresh touch would really be helpful.
Content Development | | LittleDog1 -
Content Writing - it should be for the main corporate site, blog or for social media?
Hi There, I have my main site : example.com and a related blog https://blog.example.com/ My management does not believe frequent content posting on the example.com My Queries 1- Will it help boost ranking of **example.com **if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has? 2- Every body says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help. 3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it? Hope somebody will enligten me caught in catch 22. Regards Tanveer
Content Development | | Sequelmed1 -
Is there a quick and easy way to check a website to see which outbound links open in the browser window and not in a new window?
I have just come across a few blogs on a website that have outbound links that open in the browser window (and therefore direct people off site to these links) (there are also other outbound links that open in a new window)- is there a quick and easy way to check which outbounds links open in a new window and which open in the browser window? Much obliged Liam
Content Development | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Breaking a Big Website into Multiple Unrelated Sites
I have a big cluttered website that I want to simplify. There is content for patients, researchers, therapists who are looking for grants, etc.. Would it be a bad ideas to turn these into 3 or more, completely different sites with each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better? Thanks for your help!!!
Content Development | | bosleypalmer0 -
Duplicate Content behind a Paywall
We have a website that is publicly visible. This website has content. We'd like to take that same content, put it on another website, behind a paywall. Since Google will not be able to crawl those pages behind the paywall is there any risk to ua doing this? Thanks! Mike
Content Development | | FOTF_DigitalMarketing0 -
Is there a way to repost content (with permission) to another site without being penalized by Google?
I write a monthly Social Media Marketing column for a local Business Journal and the column is printed in their paper as well as posted on their website. Is there any way I can repost these articles on my website's blog without being penalized by Google for "duplicate content"?
Content Development | | vyki0 -
Duplicat Website Content? (UK, Ireland)
Hi, My website is based in Ireland on a .ie domain & now I would like to enter the UK market on a .co.uk Is it ok for me to duplicate my .ie website and provide all the information on a .co.uk OR is this considered duplicate content in terms of Google. (I'm led to believe that your own content on my domain's is not considered duplicate & this is only considered duplicate content when you go from .com to .ie, .co.uk etc). (all content, images, branding are my own).
Content Development | | GlenBOB0
