Kill, pimp or cut loose? Ideas for a legacy ECommerce blog
-
Hi,
I'm looking to revamp the fortunes of an ailing Fashion ECommerce blog, which once had an impact on SEO for the site which it linked to but now has fallen by the wayside.
Blog sits here: www.mydomain.com/blog and links to products and categories on the ECommerce site www.mydomain.com.
The blog has about 2000 posts on it written over the past 5 years, which are almost all rewritten content about existing stories, events or embedded youtube videos related to fashion on the Web. None of the blog topics are unique, but the posts have been rewritten well and in an entertaining way - i.e. it's not just a copy and paste.
The blog is written on an old, proprietary platform and only has basic Social sharing. You can't comment on posts, or see "most popular" posts or tag clouds etc. It is optimised for SEO though, with fashion category tags, date archives and friendly URLs.
The company badly needs a shot in the arm for its content marketing efforts - so we're looking into the creation of infographics and other types of high quality, sharable content with an outreach effort. Ideally I want this content to be hosted on the Ecommerce site, but am faced with a few options which I'd appreciate the community's view on:
How I should handle the mix of the legacy content on /blog and the addition of new, "high quality" content?
- (Pimp v1) Leave the /blog exactly as is and add the new, high quality content as new posts to it. Invest in pimping the /blog UI so that it has features such as commenting/tag clouds etc. They could migrate the blog to Wordpress, but leave it on the same URL.
- (Cut loose) Leave the /blog alone, and start afresh with a new Wordpress blog for the new, high quality content. e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com. The old blog posts probably aren't worth bothering about, but it might be risky to delete them as there are a lot and are better off with them than without.
- (Pimp v2) Set up a new Wordpress blog (e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com) for the new content and move the old /blog content to it. 301 the old /blog posts to the new location. The depth of old content that exists will add weight to the new content from a user's perspective, but will seem sparse if published on its own. Not sure why I would do this, but it's an option...
- (Kill) Kill the old /blog content, start a new one for the new, high quality content.
- Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.
Thanks in advance,
George
-
In the interests of closing off the question, I've decided to keep the existing content on the same URLs and refresh the UI so it provides a better platform for hosting the high quality content.
My rationale is that I did find backlinks pointing to some of the content which would be a shame to lose, and setting up so many 301s to a new location did not seem like a good use of time.
-
5) Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.
Here's how I determine the value of my blogs...
A) how many visitors do they pull in (these generate ad income)
B) how many of those visitors are bouncing
C) how many of those visitors buy something
D) how much social action and linklove is being generated
If you ask those questions about your existing blog you might have a better perspective on killing, pimping or cutting loose. You might also discover what is working on that blog and use that as guide to creating more of what has worked in the past. In addition, if you find dead wood on the blog you know what to cut loose and what to avoid doing going forward. The analytics of the old blog can inform your future path.
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
-
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Urgent Help - Ecommerce URL best practice for SEO
Guys i need some urgent help here as we need to get this sorted out soon. We have a page similar to wayfair shop the look: www.wayfair.com/Shop-The-Look/ What are the best practices for URL structure if we applies 2-3 filters? Is wayfair style good for SEO? FYI: We create our crawlable, link friendly AJAX website using pushstate() but unsure of the structure for this case. We followed http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Blog Integration
I have a blog and website, .. I have it under the same domain but it has its own login and dashboard ect..I would like to fully integrate it to my website so it becomes a part of my main navigation... If anyone know's how to do this or even has an idea on where to start it is greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Any arguments against eliminating all (non-blog) subfolders?
Short URLs seem to do the trick from a UX perspective. For example: /primary-care vs. /why/specialties/primary-care . This convention will be applied over 30-40 pages. Note that while "/why/specialties/primary-care" isn't terribly ugly, some of our pages would look a little overly-keywordy if we go with the subfolder approach.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NueMD0 -
Issue with duplicate content in blog
I have blog where all the pages r get indexed, with rich content in it. But In blogs tag and category url are also get indexed. i have just added my blog in seomoz pro, and i have checked my Crawl Diagnostics Summary in that its showing me that some of your blog content are same. For Example: www.abcdef.com/watches/cool-watches-of-2012/ these url is already get indexed, but i have asigned some tag and catgeory fo these url also which have also get indexed with the same content. so how shall i stop search engines to do not crawl these tag and categories pages. if i have more no - follow tags in my blog does it gives negative impact to search engines, any alternate way to tell search engines to stop crawling these category and tag pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sumit600 -
Quick Survey - How much would you pay for a blog post?
Hi, I would be very grateful if you could answer a short question I have related to a project I am working on - I am trying to build up a bit of market research as to where the market lies with regard to the market rate for blog posting. The answers are pretty subjective as there are other factors in involved but for the purposes of this question, it would be helpful to have simple answers that assume: ASSUMPTIONS:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
a/. The blogs/websites are of AVERAGE quality for the domain authority given, and are genuine niche website (with their own full domains) and not sites which are haunted by spammers (ie NOT anyone can post anything sites such as article directories and Squidoo like sites etc, )
b/. The articles are of AVERAGE quality you would associate with a domain of that authority IE the articles would be better as you go up the DA scale as you would expect. Each article contains a couple of links to your target website. **QUESTION:** In $ how much would you pay for an article both **written AND posted** on a website with the following domain authorities? 1/ DA 20 2/. DA 30 4/. DA 40 5/. DA 50 6/. DA 60 7/. DA 70 8/. DA 80 9/. DA 90+ I'll start off with my answers as follows: 1/ DA 20 - $15
2/. DA 30 - $30
4/. DA 40 - $50
5/. DA 50 - $80
6/. DA 60 - $120
7/. DA 70 - $200
8/. DA 80 - $350
9/. DA 90+ - $600 What would you pay?0 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0