I have some old posts on a few blogs with content from sponsors I no longer promote so I want to delete them. For some reason I thought this could cause problems for SEO so on my Wordpress blogs I always use a redirection plugin to send the dead links to an active post/page, that way Google, etc. will not see any error pages.
Some of the old content is on a Blogs Organizer site so I contacted the software creator to ask about this and he seemed to think that deleting posts would not cause a problem. I believe he is suggesting that when Google, Bing, etc. re-index your site they will see that deleted posts are gone and revise search results accordingly.
What do you guys think? Is this right? BO does not have a redirection option so I may have to roll the dice and delete posts to see what happens. I’m nervous because one of my BO blogs with out-dated content is also one of my most popular.
How many posts does the blog have in total? And how many are you deleting? I mean, if we’re talking about a couple, I can’t imagine it’d matter much. If you’re deleting several hundred, then I’d expect to see some kind of effect.
Also, are the posts you’re going to delete handwritten or just sponsor text? I can’t imagine Google would care much about losing a bunch of pages from the index that are dupe content.
Doesn’t BO have an export tool, that you can then import into WP? Never used that program, but you might also want to see about simply importing the BO blog RSS Feeds, or something like that
Why not just delete the images and affiliate links but keep the post text. If they’re really old posts most likely your visitors won’t see them often anyways and you won’t chance losing any se traffic.
I agree with RawTop, I would probably just change all the links in those posts and link them all through to a new hidden page explaining that the site is not available, but offer alternatives. Your content won’t change, you’ll be advising your visitors properly, and you’ll be able to promote other sites of interest. You could even create separate pages for different styles of content based on what the original post and site offered.
Some sponsors might have a problem with that and request you remove their content if you’re no longer sending traffic to them (in the case of functioning sites). In that case, I would just take the media out, keep the text (if it’s your own) and do the same with a note below it.
I would definitely be wary of removing or drastically changing pages or posts, especially if you don’t have the time to check through the stats to see how many visitors that content is pulling in. You could inadvertently pull content that’s widely linked and very high in search results.
[QUOTE=msm;108255]I have some old posts on a few blogs with content from sponsors I no longer promote so I want to delete them. For some reason I thought this could cause problems for SEO so on my Wordpress blogs I always use a redirection plugin to send the dead links to an active post/page, that way Google, etc. will not see any error pages.
Some of the old content is on a Blogs Organizer site so I contacted the software creator to ask about this and he seemed to think that deleting posts would not cause a problem. I believe he is suggesting that when Google, Bing, etc. re-index your site they will see that deleted posts are gone and revise search results accordingly.
What do you guys think? Is this right? BO does not have a redirection option so I may have to roll the dice and delete posts to see what happens. I’m nervous because one of my BO blogs with out-dated content is also one of my most popular.[/QUOTE]
If you delete specific posts, they will disappear from the search engines. If you are asking that by doing that will your site overall be negatively effected? No. Just run a new sitemap and tell the search engines to download it.
If people are landing on those pages now, RawTOP’s suggestion of using a 301 redirect would be a good idea.
Thanks for the great suggestions! To clarify a few things:
Most of the blogs that have older posts on them are not overly populated, maybe 20 or 30 posts at most and of those maybe 10 to 20 should be deleted. I think some of the posts are just copy provided by the sponsor. I’ll have to check to see how specific they are and if it could stand on its own by my removing the images and changing the models name and maybe some of the text.
I got a response from Kaktusan and he said that when posts are deleted in Blogs Organizer a surfer (or search engine) that tries to access the deleted post will automatically go to the home page of the blog. I did not know that! In Wordpress a deleted page will get you an error unless you set up redirection. Score a point for BO!
If you have Google Analytics set up for that blog, you can review a list of the landing pages (say over the last 3-6 months) and identify how much traffic and also what keywords search engines are using to find that page. You then have several options:
Delete pages where the landing page hit count is low or zero ( I notice that 90% of traffic comes from as few as 10 pages on a relatively small 500 page site).
As GA identifies also identifies the keyword/landing page combination you can then delete the content from that blog post and repost fresh posts remembering to add in the KWs that were relevant to the new content.
Correct me if I am wrong (someone) but if you rank for a KW on a particular landing page, then you redirect to a new page without that KW then eventually as Google refreshes you will lose that ranking for that KW. It won’t happen straight away as Google doesn’t refresh 100% of it index daily. But it will happen.
As an aside and not relevant to you on BO as this works automatically as you said but to prevent problems i had with missing or accidentally deleted content in wordpress i use the 404-to-start which redirects errors to the home page. Although if the home page does not contain the KW as in 3 above then the ranking will be lost.
I am no expert with search engines but it seems to work for me like this.
In that scenario, I personally much prefer WordPress’ behavior. It’s really dangerous when errors don’t look like errors. You should be able to look into your error log and see the problems so you can fix them. Googlebot should know the page is an error and not a duplicate URL for your home page, etc. Now, if you want to, you can set up something on top of that to give better results to the user - like a search on the words in the URL… But that’s something you should think through and do deliberately.