Dealing with Expired & Reoccurring Content At Scale
-
Hello,
I have a question concerning maintenance & pruning content with a large site that has a ton of pages that are either expired OR reoccurring.
Firstly, there's ~ 12,000 pages on the site. They have large sections of the site that have individual landing pages for time-sensitive content, such as promotions and shows. They have TONS of shows every day, so the # of page to manage keeps exponentially increasing.
Show URLs:
- I'm auditing the show URLs and looking at pages that have backlinks. With those, I am redirecting to the main show pages.
-However, there are significant # of show URLs that are from a few years ago (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) that DON'T get traffic or have any backlinks (or ranking keywords). Can I delete these pages entirely from the site, or should I go through the process of 410-ing them (and then deleting? or ...?)Can you let 410's sit?)? They are in the XML sitemap right now, so they get crawled, but are essentially useless, and I want to cut off the dead weight, but I'm worried about deleting a large # of pages from the site at once. - For show URLs that are still obsolete, but rank well in terms of kewyords and get some traffic...is there any recommended option? Should I bother adding them to a past shows archive section or not since they are bringing in a LITTLE traffic? Or ax them since it's such a small amount of traffic compared to what they get from the main pages.
- There are URLs that are orphaned and obsolete right now, but will reoccur. For instance, when an artist performs, they get their own landing page, they may acquire some backlinks and rank, but then that artist doesn't come back for a few months. The page just sits there, orphaned and in the XML sitemap. However, regardless of back-links/keywords, the page will come back eventually. Is there any recommended way to maintain this kind of situation? Again, there are a LOT of URLs in this same boat.
Promotional URLs:
- I'm going about the same process for promotions and thankfully, the scale of hte issue is much less. However, same question as above...they have some promotional URLs, like NYE Special Menu landing pages or Lent-Specials, etc, for each of their restaurants. These pages are only valid for a short amount of time each year, and otherwise, are obsolete. I want to reuse the pages each year, though, but don't want them to just sit there in the XML sitemap. Is there ever an instance where I might want to 302 redirect them, and then remove the 302 for the short amount of time they are valid?
I'm not AS concerned about the recycled promotional URLs. There are much fewer URLs in this category. However, as you can probably tell, this large site has this problem of reoccurring content throughout, and I'd like to get a plan in place to clean it up and then create rules to maintain. Promotional URLs that reoccur are smaller, so if they are orphaned, not the end of the world, but there are thousands of show URLs with this issue, so I really need to determine the best play here.
Any help is MUCH appreciated!
- I'm auditing the show URLs and looking at pages that have backlinks. With those, I am redirecting to the main show pages.
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
-
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us. See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts. We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz. We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well. Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | bradhodson0 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
404 Errors & Redirection
Hi, I'm working with someone who recently had two websites redesigned. The old permalink structure consisted of domain/year/month/date/post-name. Their developer changed the new permalink structure to domain/post-name, but apparently he didn't redirect the old URLs to the new ones so we're finding that links from external sites result in 404 errors (once I remove the date in the URL, the links work fine). Each site has 3-4 years worth of blog posts, so there are quite a few that would need to be changed. I was thinking of using the Redirection plugin - would that be the best way to fix this sitewide on both sites?Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
Dismal content rankings
Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight. I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see. The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have. I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out... Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0 -
Duplicate content
I have to sentences that I want to optimize to different pages for. sentence number one is travel to ibiza by boat sentence number to is travel to ibiza by ferry My question is, can I have the same content on both pages exept for the keywords or will Google treat that as duplicate content and punish me? And If yes, where goes the limit/border for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | stlastla0