Unpublishing content question
-
Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles.
We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions:
1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles?
2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?
-
We yanked a whole bunch more content than that over the last few months.. blog posts that no longer got much traffic and had never really gotten any traction, articles covering topics we'd covered better multiple times, etc. If they were still drawing some traffic, we set up a 301. If there wasn't much of anything happening, we just let it 404. We haven't seen any negative impact from this so far.
I like EGOL's idea of having someone rewrite the content on those pages. If you can't get that done quickly enough to satisfy Mr. Disgruntled, set up some 302s until the new content is ready.
I'd also say that it's probably not worth rewriting unless you're planning to do it better than it was the first time around. If you can't blow it out and make it more valuable, then 301 or 404, whatever, either is probably just fine to wash your hands of it and walk away. Stressing out over one half of one percent when it's not delivering results in the first place isn't going to be worth my time, not when I could be spending that time and effort on something more profitable. Opportunity costs apply.
-
Yanking a couple of articles that make up a tiny amount of your traffic should not be a problem unless those articles have a lot of links or other off-site assets or unless those 0.51% of visitors do a lot of buying.
If you are worried about this, have someone write same-topic replacement content and toss it up on the same URL
I bought a domain that had about 25% infringed articles. I took them down right away and tossed up replacement content and the rankings held.
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
-
Linkedin: Inshares - Can I see who inshared my content?
Hi All, Just wondering... since the demise of Linkedins' Signal tool, is there a way to actually see who and where my content is being shared on Linkedin? Blog posts being published at the minute are getting inshares almost as soon as they're live and I want to know who's doing it. Any advice would be appreciated.
Branding | | SanjidaKazi1 -
Our content has been stolen
We've a new intern who spent a good few hours writing this article http://appointedd.com/blog/nominees-for-the-british-hairdresser-of-the-year-2013-announced/ - quite a good we one feel. Our main competitor has taken almost the entire thing word for word and put in up on their blog http://www.inaa.com/apiblog/?p=821 While this is a foolish move on their part, we're still quite offended over the incident as this was the intern's forst article and she'll be looking to add it to her portfolio. I was wondering what the best practice is in this situation? Is simply writing to them enough if they've demonstrated they're underhanded? Should we call them out on it? I'm simply unsure as I want to protect no only the business but the intern also. thanks!
Branding | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Tips For Promoting Content & Contacting Journalists
Hey, After months of working hard we have some great content on our website, and now seem to be getting into a flow of releasing content consistently. I think it's now time to shift a bit of focus onto getting more eyes lookng at it, and importantly the right eyes. Has anyone got any tips or advice? Kind Regards
Branding | | JonathanRolande0 -
Content Marketing for E-Commerce Sites
Let's have a real discussion about content marketing for B2B and B2C e-commerce sites. As an SEO/inbound marketer (these days, I'm not sure what to call myself other than my first name), it's part of my job to keep a pulse on what's going on in the online marketing community. My daily routine starts with checking several sites for news/discussion (Moz, Inbound.org, SearchEngineLand, etc). Anyone actively involved in the community knows the word "content" appears in more articles than any other word (ok, maybe there a few others). Want to increase brand awareness? Generate content. Want to drive more traffic to your site? Generate content. Want to build quality links? Generate content. Want to discover the Higgs particle before the physicists? Generate content (and distribute to the right audience, so not to the chemists - ok maybe to the chemists, they're a related audience). Content, content, content, we're told! Yes I did see the Rand's WBF from a couple months back about content-less marketing, but frankly his suggestions fall under the traditional model of advertising and word-of-mouth. We're online marketers baby, we're expanding and changing the traditional model - with content! Enough of content marketing about content marketing. Let's see some content marketing for the small B2C, mom n' pop client who sells gardening tools. Let's see the amazing infographic you made for your local pizzeria client that drove traffic to their site. Let's see the Q+A discussion thread you identified and contributed to as means to display 'market leadership' in your niche of home air purifiers. Look, I love the idea of content marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Displaying market leadership by answering questions and offering something beneficial to your target audience should be the way to grow business (along with having a good product/service, I guess). But it's much easier said than done. And to be clear, I never expected otherwise. The motivation for this post was to start a discussion about real-world, applied content marketing, not content marketing about content marketing. Let the conversation begin.
Branding | | b40040400 -
Google Places Question
When you are optimizing Google places campaigns what do you find to be a better way to appear for more searches? No, all customers come to the business location or Yes, this business serves customers at their locations (45 mile radius) **? **
Branding | | TheGrid1 -
Has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Can I protect the content but dump the face on the SERPS?
Hi, Is there a way to get the benefits of rel=author for protecting site content but to disconnect that from the face photo on the SERPS? We added rel=author to our unique and individually written product descriptions and reviews. This has led to a decrease in click thru thus far. I suspect this is because when searching for a product to buy the user sees the face and thinks "review" or at least "not corporate". I don't nec. want to dump rel=author in the sea yet for our ecom pages, has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Four our keywords, we are the only company of 10 well known travel sites that have the face in the SERPS, far from improving our CTR, it has trashed it. Any ideas?
Branding | | xoffie0 -
Converting Site Content to Different Niche and in Different Language
Background STORY: I'm a wordpress theme designer, and i have a 3 years old wordpress-based site in english language with more than 100 post. Let's just called this site "olddomain.com" (generic brand name, didn't have keyword on it) Almost all of content are just showcase post and download link for my Free Wordpress Theme Download. So the site is lacking in terms of quality article content. I never doing any SEO work (keyword targeting,etc) for this "olddomain.com ", but the site backlinks is growing viral since the beginning, perhaps due to the nature of a "freebie" site. Using the OSE, it showed 12,850 Total Links from 349 Linking Root domain. Back when Y! Site Explorer still exist the number of linked domain is around 64,000+ links, and google webmaster tools show the number of 655,000+ Links. It's now has PageRank 5 (for almost a year) , with Home Page Authority 62/100 and Domain Authority 55/100. But in terms of traffic and revenue, the site is doing pretty bad. I only got less than 3000 visit per month. Revenue less than $10/month from adsense, and generated less than $1000 over the last 2 years from premium wordpress theme affiliate program. Some people told me that i have to add more article to attract traffic. but the thing is, i don't really good on writing english article, It's not my native language, so i can't really express my thought. I know i can outsource article writing, but i feel more comfortable and affordable if i write from my own mind. RECENT STORY: For the last 3 months i also learn more about SEO and internet marketing , and recently doing some local keyword research in my native language (Indonesian) with google keyword tools combine with SEOmoz keywords analysis. I found more than 100+ of Indonesian keywords in multi-niche with more than 3000+ Exact local search/month. And after using SEOmoz keyword analysis, almost all of them are in relatively low competition level under 40% . So The Potential is HUGE. MY IDEA: I want to create a new multi-niche informational content-rich website based on the keywords i found on my language. Something like about.com, squidoo, or hubpages. My question is : 1. Should i completely start that site in a "newdomain.com" completely from scratch (No Pagerank, Backlinks, PA, DA) ? or I just use my existing "olddomain.com" which already got the link advantage (Pagerank 5 with thousands of backlinks) and just recreate the site-structure and put the new article content on it, although it's on different niche and different language . 2. What's the effect for search engine if you changing your site content to different niche (from wordpress theme to Multi-niche Informational website) and also to a different language (english to indonesian) Best Regards,
Branding | | thefaizal
Faizal0 -
A question on what you should always track on your users
For any website it obviously useful to know about as much of your user behaviour as possible - and part of that involves past user behaviour. This is generally done by cookies and would involve things like: Last Visit Date Number of Site Visits Number of pages viewed etc etc I'm trying to build up a list for my developers so they are trackign the information that, although may not be explicetly useful now, but may be useful for future functionality. So does anyone have a list of the key things you should always track?
Branding | | James770