Recovering an Almost Dead Blog?
-
Hello,
I wanted to ask this from long time but finally i gathered my energy to ask this long question at moz.
Well, like almost all newbies with little knowledge of SEO & google I started my first blog in 2009, as things were very different that time & with posting more and more, I was getting good results & started to build decent traffic but with poor content ( I really din't care about it ) as I was getting organic traffic.
But things changed with Google Panda Completely after 11th April 2011, Since the time Traffic keep on falling, I never made backlinks so Penguin Updates never hit us but because of Poor & thin Content Site went down lower & lower.
I took some steps like increasing word count of posts, removing some posts but nothing worked so far but nothing worked.
Blog has almost 1200 articles & most important it was my first blog so I was bit attached with it.
Now my Question is, Should I just dispose the blog & move on or There is something which I can try to recover it.
The blog is 6 years old as of of now & received 2 million organic traffic as of now. ( attached organic Traffic screenshot )
My question is, Can something be done Seriously for this blog or I should just let it go.
I will appreciate some genuine advice on that.
Thanks
-
Yep, it's a big, tedious task, but there are no shortcuts here to do it right.
-
I will try to do so, thanks for your tip of keeping the posts privately.
However 1200 posts, its a big task to do.
Can anyone recall something similar with positive results?
-
Honestly, if you're using a CMS like Wordpress, all you should need to do is unpublish the post and let the search engines sort out the rest. If a post is returning a 404, it will get dropped from the index naturally. I can't think of any reason why you'd need to do any more work than that.
Also, a tip, I prefer setting the posts I'm removing to "Privately Published" rather than deleting them entirely. I like to keep removed content as a sort of historical archive, and it returns the same 404 message on the front.
-
Yes, almost 90% posts are not getting traffic, some posts are event posts, so they get some traffic during event & nothing before or after that.
What's best way to Remove Posts, Delete & Request Webmaster's tool to deindex & Remove cache version of site? or something else?
-
Andy, You are asking questions & I am looking for answers..
I am ok if I remove all useless posts, which means almost clearing entire blog. I am also willing to contribute more on this site but thing is does it worth? Will google really start picking my blog.
What if I Remove almost 90% of posts & Just leave 10% Posts with meaningful content?
Also should I do some link building etc?
-
My guess is that most of your blog posts aren't getting any traffic or engagement, but there are probably a few that do. I would start with a content audit, looking at the organic traffic, social engagement and backlinks to each page. You may not have built any links, but that doesn't mean your work hasn't earned them. Keep anything that draws consistent traffic, has been shared more than a few times, and has good quality back links. Let the rest 404. You'll need to make the determination on a case by case basis.
-
Well, you could decimate most of the site and fix many issues, but would this be enough to pull it back for you?
Of those that would remain, would you consider them to be more authoritative posts? Would they stand up in the face of Panda without issue?
-Andy
-
Andy Problem is Most of the articles are Short News, Don't know what can be done for that. Or I may Deindex all those posts, It will be approx 1000 posts ( almost 85% ) of total posts.
Traffic Driving posts are only few, however I have been posting very less like not even 10 posts in last year.
-
As said before, Have not made backlinks for this site at all, all links are natural. I was never hit by penguin, it was Panda all the time
-
Hi Ankit,
All is not lost, but it all depends on the time you have to put in to correcting it.
Have you ever tried to fix the issues with Panda? There is a wealth of information available out there - here are a couple of Google ones to read:
Remember that Panda focuses on thin and duplicate content, which translates to low quality, so if you think that you have ways to correct this, there is no reason you can't pull the traffic back.
-Andy
-
That's disaster. I would suggest you to check each & every backlink. Trying removing the spammy ones or disavow them. Add new posts & link it to old posts. Make it active!
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
-
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Blog page won't get indexed
Hi Guys, I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now. I found this in the robots.txt file: Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/ I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
Blog separate from Website
One of my clients has a well established website, and a well established blog - each with its own domain. Is there any way to move the blog to his website domain without losing the SEO and links that he has built up over time?
Technical SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Strategy for recovering from Penguin
I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update. I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text. Some questions I have are: I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links. This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized. Is that correct? Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them? Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking? Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?
Technical SEO | | mhkatz0 -
Wordpress site, combine Blog without hurting SEO - Need Expert Advice
Hi, I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it. I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer. The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/ Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog. So you have the following: www.nextgenrestoration.com (main site) then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog) www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog Original person that built the site quit. New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress. Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match. Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
Technical SEO | | Force7
the site to Wordpress quit. So I got involved because the new person they hired could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site. Here was my Thoughts. The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update. My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating) If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site. My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there. The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site. Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog? I want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic. As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help. Thanks in advance for your time! Force70 -
Tutorial For Moving Blogger Blog From Sub-Domain to Sub-Directory
Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
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
Technical SEO | | Bucky0