Outdated blog content, majority of site, keep it or delete it?

[thelege2nd]

I have a category on my blog with 489 posts in it <snip>. They are all products I reviewed from 2014 to 2019. All of those products are expired and they don't bring traffic anymore and I am not ranking on it anyways.


there's also a lot of external 'broken links' and few internal broken links.

90% of my backlinks are linked to those posts which are in that category.

So what should I do? Should I remove them? Will I lose all of the ranking authority if I remove it?


What if I remove them and 301 redirect them to my homepage, will that help pass the SEO juice to the posts which are left in that category undeleted, since that category is linked to my homepage?

or should I just make the whole website as a subdomain and call it old.mydomain.com for example? and then start fresh again on the same domain?

Need some insights or ideas, thank you.

[edited by: goodroi at 1:11 pm (utc) on Feb 5, 2021]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please go read the rules :) [/edit]

[goodroi]

I'm a big fan of trimming dead content but this content is not completely dead. It still has backlinks. You could rewrite the content to make it current, or redirect to new versions of the products, or redirect to a buying guide for the product category. Definitely fix the internal issues.

[not2easy]

What if I remove them and 301 redirect them to my homepage...

Definitely do not do this, redirecting visitors to the home page is a bad user experience which can backfire on you as Google sees it for what it is and considers it a soft 404.

[Pjman]

I second @goodroi advice.

You have the hard part done, assuming they are quality backlinks. Update your content, much easier. You can always find lateral products, even if they have substantially more features.

I always find redirecting link juice always results in weaker than original form.

[thelege2nd]

I can't really update the content. It's dead products. No one is searching for it.

I just wanted to delete them to get rid of all those broken links altogether.

By the way, is it a bad SEO practice to write all blog posts in one category? because they are all scammy products, so I put them all into one category 'Scam list'.

Do you guys have any suggestions?

[not2easy]

If you are planning to delete the posts, at least first use noindex, noarchive tag so the 404s won't have such a severe impact.

[lucy24]

What if I remove them and 301 redirect them to my homepage

As not2easy said: Noooo. But I would serve a 410 rather than a 404, as it tends to make google stop crawling faster and then they can reallocate your crawl budget to livelier pages. Make sure to create a nice helpful 410 page for humans.

[thelege2nd]

@not2easy I have never heard of noindex and noarchive tag before. But I assume that adding those tags, is only if I intend on keeping that content on my site and visible to users?

Because what's the point in adding those tags if I am gonna delete the posts?

Or am I misunderstanding this?

[not2easy]

The point of using those tags is so that with the next crawl, you will be letting google know that you do not wish that URL to be indexed. Be sure your sitemap (if you use one) is not listing noindexed content either since Google says the sitemap is to tell them what you want to have indexed.

There is also the

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="unavailable_after: 18 Feb 2021 15:00:00 UTC"> 

tag you could use instead but that is not so simple to use with dynamic content such as WordPress or Blogger. Give it time to be crawled, then delete with a clear conscience, that you have notified Google.

[thelege2nd]

@not2easy

Oh, thank you for the clarification. Now, this makes sense.

Do you know a plugin that can do that? So I don't have to manually add the noindex, noarchive tags? its a lot of pages :D

As for the site map, I am not sure how to do that? my site map is automatically updated by yoast.

In what way do you think I should do this site map?

[not2easy]

Yoast offers settings and you can set default settings - but offhand I am not certain about whether you can set defaults on a per-category basis as I've not ever tried to do that.

I would visit the Yoast site and see what they suggest though even if I had to do it manually I am pretty sure that if it has a noindex metatag applied via Yoast that it does not get listed in the sitemap. I do know that you can apply the noarchive along with noindex using Yoast. It is a single tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive">

and it is available under "Advanced" in the post editing view.