Re-direct Irrelevant (high ranking) blog articles?
-
One of our sites has some old & completely irrelvant blog articles that are high ranking & receive the top two visited pages for the entire site (more page views than the homepage even). Our marketing managers are wanting to take down the blog posts since they are falsely inflating their traffic numbers with irrelevant visitors.
I'm concerned by taking them down and re-directing to another site it will affect our overall domain authority and rankings for relevant keywords. Thoughts and/or resources on taking down vs. keeping up?
-
I agree with you that I would probably leave them up. Redirecting those posts would likely sacrifice your ranking positions as you mentioned.
Your best bet might just be to create a new Google Analytics that removes the entire blog or at least those two posts. For your core reporting, you could just use that segment. That should allow you get the traffic but report your core KPIs on more relevant pages.
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
-
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Rankings Up instantly after publishing new blog article
Hello All, My question is, why did my site rankings go up all of a sudden as soon as I published an article in my blog and it gets indexed (almost immidiately) The rankings increase are the following Keyword 1: from Top 5 to Top 1 Keyword 2: from Top 4 to Top 2 Keyword 3: from Top 16 to Top 3 Keyword 4: from no where to Page 2 (big time keyword) Any ideas or experience on this? When it first happened early this week(i published a new article), my site rankings dropped back after a couple of days. I did the same pattern by pubishing a new article and it went back up again. No personalized result here btw. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onecov0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
Link from archived article.
A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Do comment links on blogs help the blog itself rank?
Hi I have a blog - Carzilla.co.uk - and it keeps getting what are pretty obviously spam comments with links to unconnected websites of various quality. The blog is quite new and not ranking highly in SERPs for anything in particular yet. So my question is, is it better to let some of these comments through so google can see activity on the site? Or do spammy comments with links make the site look like a link farm? Any advice on what my policy should be - purely from a Google serps perspective - would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Rank went up, But?
ok, I have been optimizing a sit for a while and decided to drop the flash site build an HTML site instead for obvious reasons. But, as I was building the new site, BANG! a big jump in Google rank? How can this be, I thought out loud. Must be all my anchor text kicking in...So, I am left with this question...Or did google pick up on my new site as I was building it. I build it on a new DNS, then revert back to the main DNS... Drop the HTML site and continue my link getting with the main site? Or chalk it up under something else and roll with new site. I hope that was not to confusing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0