Noindex or delete thousands of old thin news articles?

[mgf45]

Hi after 30 days my breaking news articles rarely get any visitors, but sometimes these thin articles are outranking keywords I was once ranking for with my high-quality content that converted into leads, which is only about 40 pages. I have 3,000 pages of thin news articles that are only meant for breaking news, they do drive traffic for a few weeks to a month and they do not convert after that time period. Pretty much useless.

Should I delete the news articles dating after 45 days or do a noindex on these news articles?

Thanks

[MayankParmar]

I'm in same situation. I have hundreds of articles with less than 100 words, but all of my latest news are well researched so they have 300+ words.

I need to do something of the old stories. Noindex imo is a better option, i'm still looking into it tho.

[panos]

If they do not convert just stop linking to them

[Shaddows]

You could 301 them to in-depth articles when the story is no longer "breaking". You could do something with scripts on your CMS to make this easier for you on the admin side.

[MayankParmar]

@panos I'm not linking to such articles. Does that make sure that I'm safe from G's updates?

@Shaddows There are plenty of WordPress plugins to do the redirect stuff. Will try that, thanks :)

[mgf45]

So a possible 301 redirect to the main 'breaking news' page sounds like a good idea.

I'm not sure if I want to do a 310

[mgf45]

An example of my situation

I have lots of strong content aiming for high volume keywords, all local. (city) (service) (type) that contain a contact form, call to action and phone number.

I was once on the first page for all these high volume keywords but they were rarely bringing in traffic. So I decided to have my team blog about anything and everything about that niche. Most of these articles did contain a high volume keyword, that eventually knocked out my quality pages off the serps and even drastically moved me to the 6th page.

So now (city) (service) (type) is ranking on the 6th page, and it's going to an outdated news article or an outdated event. Avg time spent on news article is 56 seconds and my static page about 4.5 mins.

Do you think the deleting the pages with 301 redirect is best possible solution to get these pages off the serp and get my old pagees back up? Custom 301 redirects to the static pages is not a good idea IMO since maybe only 20-30 or them rank for high volume kw.

Thanks, sorry for the ramble. hope i made sense

[tangor]

Depends on how that 301 is actually used. Should point to "new or expanded" content. Across the board pointing to only a few pages might cause g to treat it (the 301s) as soft 404s which could lead to a downgrade.

If these pages have NO VALUE AT ALL either unlink them, so they do not count in the site structure or delete them. You can either redirect 410 (gone) or just let g see them as a 404,

An alternative is to collect the content into an archive page (possibly by the "day", "week", "month") in which case a 301 to THAT page makes perfect sense and avoids "thin content".

[Shaddows]

So a possible 301 redirect to the main 'breaking news' page sounds like a good idea.

No, that's a terrible idea. Only 301 to a replacement page; one that has substantively similar content. I meant specifically in cases where

"sometimes these thin articles are outranking keywords I was once ranking for with my high-quality content that converted into leads

- In such cases redirect to the "quality" content, as they clearly overlap.

Tangor's suggestions are exactly what I would consider:

Should point to "new or expanded" content

Collect the content into an archive page (possibly by the "day", "week", "month")

[I would add, possibly archive by theme]

[riccarbi]

Being in a similar situation, my strategy is as follow:

1) if an "old news" article is no longer meaningful for my audience whatsoever, I delete it; if the same subject is covered by another, longer article on the same website I redirect the deleted old page to it through a 301

2) If the article still have some amount of useful content and there is another similar page more up to date, I merge the content of the older into the newer, remove the old page and redirect it to the merged page, again with a 301

3) If the old article is worth the effort for some reason, I update and expand its content to a length of at least 300 words (usually more)

[EditorialGuy]

I think there's value in keeping old news stories online. (Ask the New York Times--they have archived stories going back to 1851.)

IMO, the issue here isn't the age of the stories, it's the fact that they're 3,000 "thin" pages that might result in your site being labeled a content farm.

[Travis]

Too many noindex may impact your "Budget Crawl".

[mgf45]

Thanks for all the tips guys. I will keep you posted on results with analytics. I think I came up with a game plan now.

I just found out I have over 25,000 pages indexed! When all I really want to rank for is about 40 pages or less.

Unrelated to the blog post, I noticed I have several pages optimized specifically for certain kw phrase ranging from blog posts, attorney profiles, tags / archive pages, etc...I'm bleeding equity out of the top level landing page certain keyword phrases.

Huge mistake on my part :/ My site ranked so well when I had only 40 static pages. Then everything went crazy with the 15 article postings a day along with importing content from previous deleted site that had high quality content, however most of those pages were targeting the same keyword.

[tangor]

Do follow up! See how it works out and then, if willing, reveal that Game Plan! Especially if it is successful!

[citphoto]

I would love to hear how this works!