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.
Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
-
Hey all,
When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)?
My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant?
Thanks in advance,
Roman
-
for the original poster - what did you end up doing - and did it make a difference??
(and) similar question but different...
If suddenly some 90% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 10%?
in the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages.
does this make a difference these days??
keep in mind that the 4,500 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place.
will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 500 indexed pages?
tia!!
-
I would personally still noindex because I would never recommend deleting something that I have not seen when it comes to site architecture. This way you really are not lose anything and you revert if you need to.
You may find that the lack of drops you down in ranking I doubt that will happen I really doubt it but I would not want you to delete having not seen your site.
Hopefully That helps,
Tom
-
Thomas,
Most of these pages have no backlinks and contain dated information. Would you still noindex vs delete the pages?
Thanks,
Roman
-
You could go back and improve the pages if you have any URLs from other sites or back links pointing to your content and you deleted that will not be good. Plus Google Will probably not like that you chop your site and half. If they are really worthless pages no index them So your crawl budget doesn't get ruined. To me removing content because there's small problems with the Page sounds about idea very bad idea.
-
I'd recommend you do neither.
If you set them to no-index, these issues won't matter, but you won't have lost the pages and whatever value they pose. Plus, it's generally good to keep any pages that aren't of their own accord, detrimental.
However, if you'd rather not do this, I'd look more favorably on removing them than fixing each one. That's a lot of work for very little reward - most likely, at least. Really, the answer depends on how much time you have and how fixing them would weight against the benefit(s) of doing other things.
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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
I posted a link to Rand's recent Moz Blog in another forum. One of the users posted a link to this article as a counter point. Thoughts? [title edited by staff for clarity]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads2 -
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
Hi All I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter. I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain. How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com. I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Does font size affect SEO?
In the eyes of Google, would the font text size of say a news article affect SEO? For example, a slightly larger font being easier to read by those with bad eyes? Accessibility? If so, what size would be ideal? 10, 12, 14? Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640