What to do with large number of old/outdated pages?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number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most).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.
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 last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>
Hi everyone. It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>** I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap? Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Visibility for https://goo.gl/gJH7eh
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if anyone can help me with the following. At the start of May this year we really lost visibility for the homepage of this site https://goo.gl/gJH7eh. This was particularly noticeable by tracking rankings for the term 'oak furniture'. We previously ranked on page 1 for the term 'oak furniture', but since May the homepage has struggled to make the top 100 positions for this term. We're confident that we have done everything within Google's guidelines, but it seems something is really holding the homepage back. The site ranks on page 1 for 'oak furniture' on Bing. The site had previously had a manual penalty for unnatural links (warning received several years ago). These links had a particular emphasis on using the anchor text 'oak furniture'. When we took over the site we did an extensive link clean up and disavow and managed to get the penalty removed at the end of October 2013. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OFS0 -
Page titles
Hi Guys, Hope your all well and business is good. I have been going through and changing page titles for my site which is currently huge attracting massive amounts of traffic. However from my pro membership i have notice a lot of the rankings in Google search engine has decreased. I have been using a strategy that i read on SEOMoz which is; example Keyword | Page heading | company name Is this why? if so what is the best method? I have changed nothing else so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850