Kill, pimp or cut loose? Ideas for a legacy ECommerce blog
-
Hi,
I'm looking to revamp the fortunes of an ailing Fashion ECommerce blog, which once had an impact on SEO for the site which it linked to but now has fallen by the wayside.
Blog sits here: www.mydomain.com/blog and links to products and categories on the ECommerce site www.mydomain.com.
The blog has about 2000 posts on it written over the past 5 years, which are almost all rewritten content about existing stories, events or embedded youtube videos related to fashion on the Web. None of the blog topics are unique, but the posts have been rewritten well and in an entertaining way - i.e. it's not just a copy and paste.
The blog is written on an old, proprietary platform and only has basic Social sharing. You can't comment on posts, or see "most popular" posts or tag clouds etc. It is optimised for SEO though, with fashion category tags, date archives and friendly URLs.
The company badly needs a shot in the arm for its content marketing efforts - so we're looking into the creation of infographics and other types of high quality, sharable content with an outreach effort. Ideally I want this content to be hosted on the Ecommerce site, but am faced with a few options which I'd appreciate the community's view on:
How I should handle the mix of the legacy content on /blog and the addition of new, "high quality" content?
- (Pimp v1) Leave the /blog exactly as is and add the new, high quality content as new posts to it. Invest in pimping the /blog UI so that it has features such as commenting/tag clouds etc. They could migrate the blog to Wordpress, but leave it on the same URL.
- (Cut loose) Leave the /blog alone, and start afresh with a new Wordpress blog for the new, high quality content. e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com. The old blog posts probably aren't worth bothering about, but it might be risky to delete them as there are a lot and are better off with them than without.
- (Pimp v2) Set up a new Wordpress blog (e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com) for the new content and move the old /blog content to it. 301 the old /blog posts to the new location. The depth of old content that exists will add weight to the new content from a user's perspective, but will seem sparse if published on its own. Not sure why I would do this, but it's an option...
- (Kill) Kill the old /blog content, start a new one for the new, high quality content.
- Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.
Thanks in advance,
George
-
In the interests of closing off the question, I've decided to keep the existing content on the same URLs and refresh the UI so it provides a better platform for hosting the high quality content.
My rationale is that I did find backlinks pointing to some of the content which would be a shame to lose, and setting up so many 301s to a new location did not seem like a good use of time.
-
5) Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.
Here's how I determine the value of my blogs...
A) how many visitors do they pull in (these generate ad income)
B) how many of those visitors are bouncing
C) how many of those visitors buy something
D) how much social action and linklove is being generated
If you ask those questions about your existing blog you might have a better perspective on killing, pimping or cutting loose. You might also discover what is working on that blog and use that as guide to creating more of what has worked in the past. In addition, if you find dead wood on the blog you know what to cut loose and what to avoid doing going forward. The analytics of the old blog can inform your future path.
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
-
Ecommerce - Product Titles
Hi I want to find out how ecommerce sites optimise their product names: 1. When they have thousands of products 2. When some of their products are identical I notice on some sites, like this for example, they have no key phrases in their product titles http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/6249346.htm How can this help for SEO? At the moment we optimise the titles as best we can for key phrases relevant to the products and differentiating attributes. Where we get stuck is, if their are 2 identical products - how can the content team quickly add a title which is useful for customers and search engines? Some products have no differences for us, but longer tail phrases are where we could get some good returns if the research is put in - it's just very labour intensive. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey2 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Wordpress Photography Site + eCommerce Plugin
Anyone know of good photography sites set up on Wordpress with an eCommerce plugin used for selling photos or services? Just looking for ideas. I've found good referrals in the Moz archives for Wordpress eCommerce plugins. Now I'm looking for WP photography sites employing eCommerce. Thanks for sharing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Internal links in blog posts?
What's the best strategy for internal links in a blog post? Example, if I write a blog should I always place a link to the main site at the bottom when I place my signature and contact info? Should I just put links in the content? Or should I do both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Can anyone explain what the blog network penalties news is about please?
I have seen the latest news about Google penalizing blog networks and as a newbie starting out am wondering if my multi-site plans would constitute as a blog network. My question is, is having a couple of external blogs on keyword rich domains pointing back at my primary domain name considered to be a blog network of the kind that Google is penalizing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wallander0 -
This is a bit of a melon-twister - Anyone have any ideas?
As a novice I created my main site, (waspkilluk.co.uk) and it was geo-targeted for my local City (Bristol). As I got better I created sub-domains(nailsea.waspkilluk.co.uk) for the smaller towns. Now I am suffering because I need to create a sub-domain for BristoI, allowing the main site to be free from geo-targeting and thus rank more cleanly for specific topics e.g flea control, wasp control etc, etc. My question is simply this - How do I avoid or limit damaging my existing rankings when I swap the site content over to the sub-domain and remove the key word Bristol from the root domains pages. Not a short question, but any thoughts would be lovely to hear.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Any ideas?
I've been working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ for a while, and we moved on to a SEO-friendly platform in November last year. Rankings have stabilised after dropping heavily on the old platform, but they haven't improved inline with the amount of link building we've done. Does anybody have any ideas for tricks that we could have missed? Any advice would be much apptreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Why is google showing our blog like this?
Why is our blog title saying "the blog" before it in Google? X4vTU.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tatango0