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.
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
-
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.)
So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts.
I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? All, handful, none?
Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it.
As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting.
Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
-
That's what I was thinking too. It may only be a few weeks but that will give me some idea what to keep.
I just didn't know if that mattered and removing those pages would have a negative effect. But since it's on a separate domain, it guess not.
Thanks!
-
Agree 100%.
-
If it's not an urgent issue ... install analytics now and collect data for a month or two. You'll also want to install Search Console. Basically, if the pages have incoming links or traffic you'll obviously want to move them but if not and they're low quality they should probably be left behind.
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
-
How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?
We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?
Web Design | | lcourse1 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 🙂 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap
So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing. Question: Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages. Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's. When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc> <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
Web Design | | DRSearchEngOpt
hreflang="en-AU"
href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-NZ"
href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
/> Would be the correct way of doing this. I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links. I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br> Thanks!0 -
Website title next to a post title-how to remove it?
I just have checked on some of the keyword I am ranking for and found in the serp that next to the post I have also the site name. But I thought that I have remove it. Does somebody know how to remove it? perhaps I did not do it correctly. I am also using yoast seo plugin but I do not have it set there to show the site name after posts name. Can somebody help me to fix this please? I have also attached an image from the serp where is behind the post title also Villas Diani-the site name Thank you very much! Iris O1oj4W0.jpg
Web Design | | Rebeca10 -
Blog is outranking ecommerce store
My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store. The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable. The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?
Web Design | | pugh0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
Flat vs. Silo Site Architecture, What's Better
I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.
Web Design | | C-Style0