Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I recently acquired a two year old website. It's got around 1300 pages on it. Google, as far as I know, over the past year has become increasingly disinterested in this site, to the point it's only sending about 30 hits a day at most to it. Front page is PR 2, the internal pages all have either graybar or PR0. Thing is, I actually want to try and do something with it, mainly because it actually has some good original content on it and also just to experiment with. Problem is, there's a ton of useless pages as well. There's not a lot of external links pointing to the internal pages and most of those page are graybar and not even indexed. I've been working on a couple plans to try and increase the power of the site - namely by pruning all the graybar unranked junk out of it.
A little more info. The site is a fairly well interlinked wordpress blog that also consists of pages that aren't a part of the blog itself. The navbar leads to 24 alphabetically organized pages that in turn link to specific topic pages, that in turn link to particular posts of the blog. The topic pages are where he was originally attempting to flow most of the link juice.
What I'd like to do basically is try to centralize the link juice that's being acquired through the useful content by eliminating all the crap and making a much, much smaller site. My plan was to start off by cutting out all internal links to and then deleting any pages that aren't deemed worthy of staying on the site - stub graybar pages that have no external links pointing to them. Many of these are blog posts that I can't really hide from Google as it's going to find them looking through the blog portion of the site and through the related posts plugin that's being used. The only option I can come up with unless I go through the headache of making a new navigation system for the blog is to delete the posts entirely.
Would that work in helping to restore some form of power to the site? And how would Google handle a ton of 404 errors if it happens to go looking for pages that aren't there anymore? Would it just ignore them beyond warning me about them in webmaster tools or could it affect the site negatively in the SERPs somehow?
Thanks for any info!
The navbar leads to 24 alphabetically organized pages that in turn link to specific topic pages, that in turn link to particular posts of the blog.
This doesn't strike me as a good way to organize things for Google, unless you're running a dictionary.
Have you taken the necessary steps to verify the site and get it in webmastertools so you can take a deeper look at the site?
You also need to have a good plan for organizing the content that remains, and that should be topical rather than arbitrarily alphabetical... which, as I noted, just doesn't make sense in most cases.
Also, is the blog an adjunct of the site, or are the fixed pages an adjunct of the blog? Where are most of your external inbound links now going? What are your plans for driving future traffic?
I agree about the alphabetical organization needing to go. Probably about 25% of the topical pages that they're linking to are of any worth anyway, so I can come up with a better system for that.
The fixed pages are an adjunct of the blog. It's actually a weird setup the more I look at it. Probably could've just used a few simple category pages for the posts and left the fixed pages off in their own section while feeding them some contextual links from the posts. I'm going to drive a number of links into it once the cleanup is done, particularly to inner pages to try and get them ranked where they used to be. It's already got a number of external links pointing to some of the inner pages, mainly ones created earlier in the site's history. The frontpage has a good number of links pointing at it, just not enough to sustain something of it's current size.
My main concern was all the 404s. I don't see a reason to try and 301 every single one of them since they don't have any juice or links going to them anyway. I guess I'm gun shy about deleting over half a site as I've never messed with something of that magnitude before. But I figure if it's low quality pages it won't matter outside of warnings in webmaster tools right?
My main concern was all the 404s
I'd suggest a server log study to learn which urls are entry pages for search traffic, or have backlinks or get entry traffic through direct navigation.
Handle those with an appropriate redirect and don't worry about the other 404s. They should not cause any ranking problems for the rest of the site and Google will eventually hoover them out of their current index - with an occasional respider to see if you decided to use those urls again.
