Delete 500 posts that aren't ranking but may have on site value?

6 replies
  • SEO
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This is as much of a mental dump as it is a question, doubt i can actually act on it but also think it could lead to an interesting conversation

lets say you have a website with 1,000 plus posts, and for the sake of this conversation lets say they are mostly on travel and expat life

you rank well for expat life, maybe not quite as well as you would like, but your site is still earning enough money that you are satisfied and don't want to do anything to risk that

on the other hand any post on travel or anything else does not rank on google at all, when you look in webmaster tools the few that do get any google traffic only come from when people search for expat type queries and the travel post ends up in the results instead of the intended expat life post

you do rank on yahoo for both, but as we all know yahoo isn't a big deal, and there is the potential that if you delete all of your travel/other posts your expat life posts could potentially jump to the top of the rankings

having a significant boost in google rankings for these would far outweigh the small loss of traffic from what the travel posts are bringing in

but visitors to the site surely like having longer reads on the travel inbound links, so you get longer visit times and it may help you convert.... for the sake of this discussion lets say the main affiliates are all travel related and not exactly expat related, though you can still market the travel affiliates on the expat pages

so.... even though you are fully content now and things are actually going better than you could have expected do you make the ballsy move of deleting all the travel stuff? or do you not rock the boat and be happy with what you have?
#500 #delete #posts #ranking #site
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  • Profile picture of the author johnnyjon
    hey don't all reply at once ok
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  • Profile picture of the author MattHod
    I'd keep the pages personally and figure out the reasoning behind why the pages for travel aren't getting much traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author dmrson
    I wouldn't delete content, it add value to your site and adds ranking for long tail keywords potential, and the PageRank dilution will be very minimal.
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  • Profile picture of the author XenG
    I would improve those that are not ranking well. If the pages/posts have been there for quite some time, I see that as a good thing. The older the page, the better. The urls have been indexed for quite some time. So, instead of getting rid of the posts, I'd rather improve then one by one.
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  • Profile picture of the author johnnyjon
    thanks for replies... what if you have already rewritten them and feel they are as good as you can make them, and done the best on page SEO you can do?

    big G has made it clear they will only rank for the expat stuff but not the travel stuff, even if some of the travel stuff is written better than some of the well ranking expat stuff

    keeping them is probably the best play, raises the overall user experience giving visitors more to read about.... but have to wonder
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  • Profile picture of the author YourGoToWriter
    For me, I won't delete those pages. Instead, I will fix and improve those ones that are not ranking very well. I also believe that the age of a page can be a factor in ranking so that might help me in the long run.

    Loren
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