Best way to handle outdated & years old Blog-posts?
-
Hi all,
We have almost 1000 pages or posts from our blog which are indexed in Google. Few of them are years old, but they have some relevant and credible content which appears in search results. I am just worried about other hundreds of non-relevant posts which are years old. Being hosting hundreds of them, our website is holding lots of these useless indexing pages which might be giving us little negative impact of keeping non-ranking pages. What's the best way to handle them? Are these pages Okay? Or must be non-indexed or deleted?
Thanks
-
I can tell you what we do. With over 35 000 posts we are always tweaking the better ones and dropping the dead weight. I'm currently going through a bunch of posts from 2010. I run two quick tests on them - I check the PA [page authority] on Moz. If it's 1 then that's one strike, anything higher I consider working on the post. Next is a quick check in Google Analytics for traffic over the past 6 months. As you can imagine many posts from 7 years ago have 0 traffic. This is strike 2 and in my ballpark, 2 strikes means 'you're out!'. I delete the posts, a hard 404. As we cut the driftwood from our nets I feel we will be more efficient at catching more fish.
-
I have a couple of suggestions for this.
1. You can 301 redirect the pages/posts that are low-quality to higher quality/more relevant pages, or you could even decide to rewrite the topics to update them in a new post to improve the content and then 301 the old posts to the updated content. If you decide to 301, you should make sure to use a rel=canonical tag so Google knows what pages are the right ones to index.
2. You can also recycle your high performing content into new posts. For example, if you had a post that was 10 Best _____ for 2010, you could rewrite the same post now, updating any neccessary info, and name it 10 Best _____ for 2017.
Hope that helps some. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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
-
My website is not configured in AMP pages, but it is mobile-friendly.
Hi
Algorithm Updates | | rayabahadur
My website is not configured in AMP pages, but it is mobile-friendly.
Last month, my website was ranked to 10 positions for this keyword (Magento Development Company).
Sometimes it's showing on 25 positions but not in the top 5 positions. Here is my URL (for analysis):
https://www.nevinainfotech.com/magento-development-service/
Would you please explain why my keyword rankings are often not showing in the search listings?
Would you mind letting me know is there anything I need to change?
Thank0 -
Domain location is a ranking factor? Back links & website?
If a website trying to rank in US and it has received many back-links from domains hosting from other countries; how it will impact website ranking? Can a website hosted in country will rank well in other country? How much the hosted location matters? Like....domain hosted in Germany but trying to rank in US?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
If my article is reposted on another blog, using re=canonical, does that count as a link back?
Hey all! My company blog is interested in letting another blog repost our article. We would ask them to use "re-canonical" in the mark-up to avoid Google digging through "duplicate" info out there. I was wondering, if the other site does use the "re=canonical", will that appear as a backlink or no? I understand that metrics will flow back to my original URL and not the canonical one, but I am wondering if the repost will additionally show as a backlink. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | cmguidry0 -
When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords?
Hey guys I have a few questions. I am pretty sure that I was penalized by Panda a few years back because I went very heavy on bold, italic and underlining my keywords. Since then I removed the bold, italic and underlines and never have used them again. I was just reading an article on the Moz Blog and I saw some bold words. My questions are, When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords? Any help would be great! Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | Videogamefan1 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
Setup WordPress with www in General -> Settings to get benefits of old links or does it matter?
Hello, I looked through many other Q&A and couldn't find this answer exactly... We build all of our client's sites on WordPress which automatically assign the new websites with no www. at the beginning. Recently one of our customers was upset because his new site (non-www) had only 3 links to it and his old www.domain.com site had 548. Is the simplest way to fix this to go into the WordPress Settings -> General and just change the WordPress Address and Site Address to the www version? Does it even matter or does WordPress tell Google to look at both versions. We don't see any SERP impact by having the non-www version up, but if it is an easy fix to get the 548 link credit I'll take it! Reason I'm concerned is I do see the difference in OSE and would prefer to have 548 links vs. 3 also! Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks community!
Algorithm Updates | | Tosten0 -
How does my blog help in SEO
Hi I have recently put a wordpress blog on my site and have employed a few blog writers, each putting 2 or 3 posts per week up. There brief so far has been to write interesting, humorous and topical articles. Stupid as it may seem I have done this only because the general consensus seemed to be "you must have a blog for SEO" Does it help? Assuming it does: Should I post the same articles to my facebook page and or anywhere else? Should the articles have anchor text linking back to my site? What should I do to make it work well? Thanks in advance Andy
Algorithm Updates | | First-VehicleLeasing1