Today I'm going to talk to you about how to get rid of legacy old pages on your website that aren't doing anything for you, you'll learn how to take those and maximize them so that you're driving more traffic to the page that you care about. And as a result, you're lifting the overall authority and traffic levels on your entire website.
What I'm talking about here today is, you've got all these old posts, maybe it's a legacy website, you've got old websites, old blog posts. And these things have been optimized for terms that are competing with rest of your site.
Maybe these pages are thin content, meaning they only have 100 words or less, or a couple hundred words, and they're not really substantial. They don't have what it takes to rank really well inside of google today.
They don't have what it takes to drive social media traffic or to be really a top tier piece of content on your website.
The first thing we want to do is kind of talk about the method to evaluate what pages are good and what pages are bad.
That's what I'm going to jump into first. After that, I'm going to teach you how to deal with these pages and then what the end result will look like for you.
Evaluating Your Site
The first thing is evaluating your site and trying to find out where these pages are. Go inside of Google Analytics, and set a filter, and find all the pages on your site that aren't driving any traffic.
They haven't driven any traffic for you for the last six months or so. If that's the case, and they're not driving any traffic from social media, from Google, and just in general, there's no traffic coming in, you're going to know that these are poor performing posts.
In addition to that, you're going to want to look at tools like SEMrush, and if these post ranking for anything. If they are, then you know, you might want to put those into one bucket.
If they aren't ranking for anything, then put them into another bucket.
And then finally, use a tool like Ahrefs or Majestic, to find out if any of these pages have links to them. If they do have links to them, then make sure you put them into another bucket, because that means that they're going to have some implications for our step.
Now you kinda know what post isn't getting any traffic, and which post isn't ranking for anything, which post don't have any links.
Let move to the next step
404, Redirect Or Repurpose The Page
Those post generally are going to be ones that you're going to deal with, and essentially, what your options are with all these posts is that you have the option to,
* 404 the pages,
* Redirect The Page
* Repurpose The Page
Meaning that you're going to be kinda trying to get it new life.
Let's Talk About 404ing The Page
if there are one or 100 or thousands of pages, they have zero value, and there's not really a place that makes sense to redirect them, meaning they're not really optimized for a keyword, they don't have any links pointing at them, no traffic coming in, there's no authority.
In some cases, there's no need to 301 redirect those pages. You can just 404 them
301 Redirect
If these pages have some really low rankings, or some external links to them, or a little bit of traffic, in those cases, you're gonna want to 310 redirect those pages to the page that you want to rank the highest for the term that you're going after.
Repurpose
If you've got pages that used to rank well for some things, and they're on maybe the second or third page at google or something like that, that's an excellent opportunity to go in, refresh those pages, do a new keyword assignment, maybe add some video, some optimized images, everything that you can think about to pack into that page to make it so that it's a quality piece of content.
Republish that page, do some marketing for that page, get it back out there again, so that you can get that to be ranking where it was before, and you can start getting in some fresh traffic again.
through these methods, what's going to happen is, you're going to get rid of all these bad pages on your site. You're going to refresh pages that used to rank.
You're going to redirect pages that aren't doing anything for you, and transfer authority to pages that you want to rank that might have been competing with these other pages.
Pruning Your Site
Overall, by kind of pruning your site, it's going to make it so that each of those individual pages ranks better, these other pages you get rid of, and the overall website starts to grow better inside of the search engine.
This's a great process, and I highly recommend that you do it for yourself. It can be a lot of work, but the payoff is going to be big, not only for your individual post but for the website as a whole.
That's it for today. Hope you learn something and good luck with getting rid of those old posts.
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