Best Practice to Remove a Blog
-
Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered
Hi,
I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site.
I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are
1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant.
2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed.
Thoughts?
Thanks
PS
A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404
-
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***
In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.
By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.
-
I agree also. Thank you
As far as subdomain or subfolder, I see no difference. Can you explain Kane?
-
Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.
-
In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.
On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.
-
The blog has little value, with almost no user traffic.
It will be redesigned in a subdomain on the site.
I am only concerned with crawlers/google crawlers etc..and being penalized for tons of missing pages by 404'ing
There is nothing linking to the blog
-
A few other questions for you first:
- Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
- Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
- Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?
A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:
- No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
- No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).
-
Hiya,
Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:
I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.
You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.
The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.
How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.
Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?
If you decide to remove you content:
Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.
Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.
I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Some Issues about my Blog
I am facing issue regarding to my Blog https://digitalmedialine.com/blog/. As some pages are not Rank in google yet. Can Anyone help me out how to rank those blogs to improve my Traffic. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | qwaswd0 -
What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
Hi, I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:- (a) they are mostly too long (b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice) (c) they don't use Static URLS An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Is it good practice to update your disavow file after a penalty is removed.
I was wondering if you could use the disavow file by adding to it - even after your site has recovered from a partial site penalty. As a recurring SEO procedure, we are always looking at links pointing to our Website. We then ascertain those links that are clearly of no value. In order to clean these up, would it be good practice to update your disavow file with more of theses domains. Is the disavow file just used for penalty issues to alert google of the work you have done? (we have had penalty in the past but fine now) Would this method help in keeping high quality links to the fore and therefore removing low quality links from Googles eyes? I would welcome your comments.
Technical SEO | | podweb0 -
Redirect blogspot blog ?
Hi We have an ecom site selling childrens clothing. We startet up with a blogspot blog due to the lack of that option from our provider. I have a few links in to the blogspot blog and realized today that the PA is 39 - the PA of homepage of ecom site is 40. Ive lately been using the ..../blog on my ecom site. The functionality so far of it is so bad that i am considering using the blogspot blog again. How can i best utilize the strength of our blog at blogspot. Just keep posting w anchor text to relevant pages our main site? Is redirecting a possibility at all ? Dan Lærum
Technical SEO | | danlae0 -
.htaccess file in wordpress blog
I want to redirect non www to www in blog hosted by wordpress. Where can i find .htaccess file ? Shall i have to create a new one ? If yes, where should i upload it ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Best 404 Error Checker?
I have a client with a lot of 404 errors from Web Master Tools, and i have to go through and check each of the links because Some redirect to the correct page Some redirect to another url but its a 404 error Some are just 404 errors Does anyone know of a tool where i can dump all of the urls and it will tell me If the url is redirected, and to where if the page is a 404 or other error Any tips or suggestions will be really appreciated! Thanks SEO Moz'rs
Technical SEO | | anchorwave0 -
Internal vs external blog and best way to set up
I have a client that has two domians registered - one uses www.keywordaustralia.com the other uses www.keywordaelaide.com He had already bought and used the first domain when he came to me I suggested the second as being worth buying as going for a more local keyword would be more appropriate. Now I have suggested to him that a blog would be a worthy use of the second domain and a way to build links to his site - however I am reading that as all links will be from the same site it wont be worth much in the long run and an internal blog is better as it means updated content on his site. should i use the second domain for blog, or just 301 the second domain to his first domain. Or is it viable to use the second domain as the blog and just set up an rss feed on his page ? Is there a way to have the second domain somehow 'linked' to his first domain with the blog so that google sees them as connected ? NOOBIE o_0
Technical SEO | | mamacassi0