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Noindex for large blog -- better to delete?

by Matt86
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
A large blog I run for a company has an extensive author list. Many of the authors are not good writers, hence we've gotten into the practice of giving them a 'noindex' tag. At this point, the noindex tags far outweigh the normal articles...I would say probably 8 to 1. We have tens of thousands of articles altogether.

We're trying to boost our organic rankings.

Do you think it's bad practice to keep noindexing them? Would you recommend deleting them instead?
#— #blog #delete #large #noindex
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Well yeah, if you have poorly written pages and bad writers, what are they doing on the site in the first place? Unless those pages have some good links pointing at them or unless they rank well for your targeted phrases, get rid of them!

    That said, neither no-indexing them nor deleting them is likely to boost your rankings.
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  • Profile picture of the author expmrb
    Low quality articles are dead weight. Unless they are important somehow and serving their own purposes. And no-idexing or deleting, its your choice they are not helping your rankings.
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    • Profile picture of the author retirement plans
      Is it not bad to delete a web page? Doesn't it come back as a 404 error? Please explain, thanks!
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      • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
        Originally Posted by retirement plans View Post

        Is it not bad to delete a web page? Doesn't it come back as a 404 error? Please explain, thanks!
        404 errors do not negatively affect website rankings unless your whole site is 404 errors and you are linking to those defunct articles. It's almost impossible for a site not to have 404 errors.

        If they really bother you, you can also use Search Console to permanently remove a URL.
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanbiddulph
    It's gonna be tough to boost your organic rankings with low quality content, Matt. Like trying to sprint up Mount Fuji with Godzilla on your back; impossible. Google will not rank a blog with a heavy amount of crappy content these days. Delete low quality posts, I say.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blakers1
    It sounds like your site has a lot of posts and pages, which means this 'dead weight' everyone is referring to is specifically hurting your crawl budget. Google only has so much server resources in a given week to devote to crawling your site. If you're wasting that budget on poorly written pages, there's a chance Googlebot is missing some of your higher quality articles.

    I get that you applied a noindex tag, but I've seen pages 'in the wild' show up in the SERP even though we had applied a NoIndex tag to the page. I'd delete these pages and either remove them from GSC as Dave suggested or possibly just redirect them to related pages with better content. You should check AHREFS and GSC first to make sure you're not taking down any pages with existing inbound links. For your internal linking, I would run an SEMrush audit after you're done to make sure you didn't also create internal broken links to these pages.
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    • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
      Originally Posted by Blakers1 View Post

      You should check AHREFS and GSC first to make sure you're not taking down any pages with existing inbound links.
      Well, you can still remove those thin/worthless pages that are linked-to, provided you do a 301-redirect to a much better, relevant page. And, it doesn't hurt to contact the site(s) that was/were linking to the old page and get them to switch the backlink to the new, better page.
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      • Profile picture of the author Blakers1
        Agreed and I guess the way I wrote that it wasn't 100% clear. If they are bad articles with inbound links, just redirect to a better page that's as close to the same topic as possible.
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        • Profile picture of the author savidge4
          Originally Posted by Blakers1 View Post

          Agreed and I guess the way I wrote that it wasn't 100% clear. If they are bad articles with inbound links, just redirect to a better page that's as close to the same topic as possible.
          I understand this option is available... but, for me personally, im not a big fan - the whole "as close to the same topic as possible" could be more defeating than just leaving the text.

          The "Best" answer in my opinion is to go in and re write the bad content. Its a pain in the tail end, sure. in the end however you will be in a better place. Like many have suggested, removing it, or no-indexing the content is not going to help.

          Just jump in and one article a day, make it right.
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  • Profile picture of the author praetserge
    Why don't you moderate the articles? Why would you post bad articles on your site?
    1. You post crap and noindex them... no point but bad UX.
    2. You post those articles and they offer no value... why post them?


    So unless those articles bring you se traffic I see no reason to post them.
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