What to do with large number of old/outdated pages?
-
Are we redoing a large portion of our site (not ecommerce). We have a large number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most).
What should I do with those pages?
Could you give any guidance on whether we should or what affect it might have one the rest of the website if we delete those pages or simply 301 redirecting all those pages to the home page?
-
I would perform an 80/20 analysis and see if these pages are driving any traffic to your website. If they aren't performing well, I would delete them and redirect them to similar pages or back to the homepage.
I agree with Bernadette about checking Open Site Explorer. You want to makes sure you are not going to be giving up any valuable backlinks that these pages might have generated.
-
Thank you, I looked at the past year and they are not getting traffic. Spot checking these pages using Open Site Explorer also doesn't show external links to those pages.
My concern is that since these pages represent over 2/3 of our total indexed pages - if we just get rid of them (whether 301, 404, 410 or a combination) Would that negatively affect the remaining pages?
-
The first thing I would do is look at Google Analytics for the past year (or more) to see if those pages have any traffic. You've mentioned that you looked at that, but didn't say how long of a time it was.
Typically, we do recommend redirecting those pages to the most appropriate current page on the website. If those pages don't have anything to do with what you're current selling or offering, then you might want to simply server up a 404 error (ideally a 410 gone error).
I would also look at the links, such as by using Open Site Explorer or Majestic.com to make sure there aren't any external sites linking to those pages. If there are external links to certain pages, you'll want to redirect them.
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
-
Home page vs inner page?
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
SEO implication of adding large number of new product pages
If I have an eCommerce website containing 10,000 product pages and then I add 10,000 new product pages using a bulk upload (with limited/basic but unique content), does this pose any SEO risk? I am obviously aware of the risks of adding a large number of low quality content to the website, which is not the case here, however what I am trying to ascertain is whether simply doubling the number of pages in itself causes any risk to our SEO efforts? Does it flag to the Search Engines that something "spammy" is happening (even if its not)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Landing pages, are my pages competing?
If I have identified a keyword which generates income and when searched in google my homepage comes up ranked second, should I still create a landing page based on that keyword or will it compete with my homepage and cause it to rank lower?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Great_Projects0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Linking to local pages on main page - keyword self-cannibalization issue?
Hi guys, Our website has this landing page: www.example.com/service1/ Is this considered keyword self-cannibalization if on the above page we link to local pages such as: www.example.com/service1-in-chicago/ www.example.com/service1-in-newyork/ www.example.com/service1-in-texas/ Many thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0