Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?
-
Hi everyone,
On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients.
Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed.
I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do?
Thank you very much in advance.
-
You are welcome!
Ross
-
Hi Ross,
Thank you very much for your reply. This is exactly what I've done - I decided to delete all these irrelevant blog posts from our website and assigned a 410 status to them with custom page for users who land on any of these pages to make the user experience a little bit better.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my question
Alex
-
Hi there,
I would only keep the content that is related to the business unless you are getting a lot of traffic from these articles that are not related to heating systems and gas cylinders. Getting traffic it is always good to show Google that your site is interested enough to get visitors. If you decide to remove these blog posts, I would check if any of these irrelevant posts have any backlinks before you remove them. If they do have some links should try to redirect them to relevant pages that you would on your site or just keep them because of the high-quality links. It is a good idea to set up these deleted pages to 410 ( Page Gone) so Google will remove from the index much faster.
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
-
Can I use expired domain content on My Blog
Hello Expert, I wanted to know, can I use expired domain content on my blog channel. I have done many searches on google but couldn't find a satisfactory answer. Please help me to find out this.
Content Development | | vijay77960 -
How to deal with lot of old content that doesn't drive traffic - delete?
Hi community, i hope someone can help me with this, We are migrating our e-commerce site next februari. I'm preparing the content migration. For a large part exact copies of our product listing and product detail pages will be migrated.
Content Development | | Marketing-Omoda
However, we also have a lot of old blog content, which is, because of seasonality and trendiness, outdated and doesn't drive traffic anymore. It actually is just worthless content. (Not only as a traffic driver, this also counts for extremely low to none internal driven traffic (both internal search and internal navigation). We have about 4.000+ blogs of which about 100 drive the most traffic (mostly incited by e-mail and social campaigns and internal navigation promoted on important category landing pages during some period. Is it a bad signal to search engines to delete these old content pages? I.a.: going from a content-rich to a content-poor site?
Off course I will migrate the top 100 traffic earning content and provide proper redirects to them0 -
References for Healthcare Blog Content?
Hey everyone, We have a couple B2C medical/healthcare clients we produce content for and I was wondering what the industry stance is when it comes to giving references at the end of a blog, assuming there were no statistics or direct quotes used in the content. A lot of our content is written via research on a specific condition/treatment and doesn't really dive deep into specific medical nuances. Things like risks, recovery timelines, questions to ask, etc. are written about mostly. Still, should we be providing general references at the end of blogs to sites like WebMD, Medscape, etc. Thanks for any input!
Content Development | | danielreyes0 -
Is it ok to have two blogs for my website?
Hi Pep's The blog for my website is integrated, but does not have a URL that matches the text. The company I use for my site say that it can't be changed. Basically it displays numbers instead of text in the url. So I thought, what about starting another blog as well as the original. Would this have any effects on my SEO, negative or positive? Any advice greatly appreciated! 🙂
Content Development | | MissThumann1 -
Community Discussion - How do you create and distribute content?
Hi there, Moz Community! It's Thanksgiving here in the US, and this year I'm thankful for the release of Moz Content. 🙂 With that in mind, I'd like to revisit Kelsey Libert's November 5 Moz Blog post on creating and distributing content to kick of a community discussion to hold us over during this long weekend. Kelsey said: "Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers." What do you think? How much effort do you put into getting your content distributed? Do you have particular strategies for creating your content? What are they?
Content Development | | MattRoney5 -
Anyone have a collection or list of spammy websites?
Random I know. I started a fun pet project at www.me-not-spammer.info. Total spam. Totally says it's not spam. Satire and all, something only SEO people will get really. Anyway I want to make a sidebar of other "not spammers" and need to find a bunch of spammy websites. Problem is they don't rank in search engines obviously so I know of only the ones who leave comments on some of my wordpress sites. Anyone have a list of a bunch of them so I can link to them in my blogroll?
Content Development | | DanDeceuster1 -
How can I rank using translated content?
My friend has a website with similar content to mine, in a different language however. He has allowed me to translate his content if I link to it every post (can be nofollow). Does Google penalize me for clearly translated content? How can I make sure it ranks well? BTW, if I convince him that I don't link to him, is it better SEO-wise? Best,
Content Development | | kikocherman
Cherman0 -
Duplicat Website Content? (UK, Ireland)
Hi, My website is based in Ireland on a .ie domain & now I would like to enter the UK market on a .co.uk Is it ok for me to duplicate my .ie website and provide all the information on a .co.uk OR is this considered duplicate content in terms of Google. (I'm led to believe that your own content on my domain's is not considered duplicate & this is only considered duplicate content when you go from .com to .ie, .co.uk etc). (all content, images, branding are my own).
Content Development | | GlenBOB0