Deleting low quality content
-
Hi there. I have a question about deleting low quality content pages hopefully anyone could share your feedback on.
We have a b2c ecom store and Product Pages are our target LDPs from search. We've built many information pages that are related to different products in the long past that are linked to related product pages.
Problem is many of them lack so-called quality content in terms of volume and quality and they aren't helping. Especially since early this year, organic traffic started declining after having peaked in Feb.
So I'm considering deleting those we and Moz consider low quality that are not receiving search traffic.
Firstly, is that a good idea? Secondly, how should I go about it? Just delete them and put a redirect so that deleted pages will point to related pages or even homepage?
Looking forward to any expert input.
-Yuji -
you do need to obtain seo advice, but often, we don't advise to delete the page but to improve it substantially.
If you have duplicated content, remove it and replace it with well-written, white-hat, high-quality content marketing. This is how we've improved many businesses' local seo by improving on-page SEO, rather than deleting it completely.
-
It would be best to talk to an[SEO Agency to get advice before you delete any blog posts or main pages.
-
Thanks for your advice. Yes, we will definitely be careful deleting pages. Thanks a lot!
-
That's a really good idea! Cut down what you have to manage to the essentials and then spend more time on those pages. Make sure you do some kind of ranking or traffic audit against all the pages though. You don't want to delete the versions of each page which have some (even if it is small) SEO power. You want to target the ones which Google isn't using
-
Thanks a lot for your feedback. It was helpful. I think we may need to remove pages leaving only unique ones and update their content to be more valuable. Thanks!
-
This is usually speaking **not the right mind set **to succeed.
When Google says (through decreasing ranking positions) that you haven't put in enough effort, usually deleting a poor attempt garners no favour in the ranking results. Think about it. Google are saying "you don't have enough quality content" and your answer is to delete content, thus having less than before. Does that seem like a genuine attempt to comply with the increasing stringency of Google's guidelines?
Deleting stuff is the easy way out. Think about it as if you wrote an essay in College and Google were the examiner. They Give you a D- for your essay and mark certain areas of your work as needing improvement. If you deleted those paragraphs, did nothing else and re-submitted the essay would you honestly expect a better grade?
Google want to see effort, unique content, value-add for end users. _Real _hard graft.
If you have high volumes of pages which are identical other than one tiny tab of information or a variable price, then maybe streamlining your architecture by removing pages is the answer. If most of the pages are unique in function (e.g: factually different products, not just parameter-based URL variants etc) then it's more a comment on the lack of invested effort and you must tackle your mindset if you want to rank.
N.B: By effort I don't mean your personal effort. I could also be alluding to the fact that budget was too low when producing content. I'm describing the site - not you personally!
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
-
301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
About duplicate content
We have to products: - loan for a new car
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC
- load for a second hand car Except for title tag, meta desc and H1, the content is of course very similmar. Are these pages considered as duplicate content? https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-tweedehands-auto.html
https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-nieuwe-auto.html thanks for the advice,0 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry) Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example) Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword. These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc) Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure 🙂 So - to questions/thoughts. 1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally. 2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them) 3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant? 4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that? I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Capote0 -
Should I be deleting spam trackbacks/pingbacks?
I'm getting spammy trackbacks/pingbacks on my Wordpress site. Should I bother deleting these or do these count as backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
Geo-Targeting Content
I'm to get some ideas on restructuring existing content for geo-targeting. Example: Botox Page Tis is a hypothetical situation -- laser cosmetics clinic in Atlanta trying to rank for Atlanta Botox. The existing content is general information about botox procedures. The problem is editing the content to add Atlanta to the H1 tag and page copy. I'm wondering if there are some techniques to make the edits flow better? My idea is to add a geo-page for each procedure, but I'm wondering if this might interrupt or confuse users in the navigation funnel. Your thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 190west0