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Deleting articles from the site - what impact?

by staffjam
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
We have a contributor to the website that we have had a big disagreement with - basically they are being completely unreasonable and have asked us to remove their articles from the site.

I am going to comply but was wondering about the best way to do it without incurring penalties?

They only have 62 articles so it's not a big number - I just want to be sure I'm doing it the best way.

Is it possible to just delete them?

Thanks for any advice.
#articles #deleting #impact #site
  • Profile picture of the author intergen
    Any links from those articles will be lost. You need to be sure those links get redirected to pages on the site otherwise they will throw a 404.

    If its a WP site there is a plugin you can use called DigiLinkDoctor - it will detect link that get broken and allow you to fix them with a couple of clicks.

    No matter what - you should run that plugin on your site - I'm not an affiliate of them
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    • Profile picture of the author MrVen
      The safest way I could think is,

      de-index those articles from Google (you can make request for those URLs from webmaster tool)

      Once they are all de-indexed (mostly in a week time), you can delete those articles.

      or vice versa (delete and then request for de-index).
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      • Profile picture of the author SEO Haven
        Originally Posted by intergen View Post

        Any links from those articles will be lost. You need to be sure those links get redirected to pages on the site otherwise they will throw a 404.

        If its a WP site there is a plugin you can use called DigiLinkDoctor - it will detect link that get broken and allow you to fix them with a couple of clicks.

        No matter what - you should run that plugin on your site - I'm not an affiliate of them
        That's some good advice. This goes for external links pointing to any of the articles you want to remove, just to clarify.

        Originally Posted by MrVen View Post

        The safest way I could think is,

        de-index those articles from Google (you can make request for those URLs from webmaster tool)

        Once they are all de-indexed (mostly in a week time), you can delete those articles.

        or vice versa (delete and then request for de-index).
        Not really necessary, since Google will pick it up by itself. The only impact it can have is on your traffic, which you can analyze with Google analytics (seeing which of those pages got a lot of traffic, then 301 redirecting those pages to other relevant, -preferably internal, pages/posts).
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