Blog Restructuring Approach

[cfazio]

Hello!

We have a website with great potential for a strong content/blog strategy.

Our team knows what needs to be done to provide real value for the target audience.

However, the website's current blog features ~50 posts that are low-value fluff. Looking at metrics alone only 4 posts have had >10 organic clicks in the last 12 months - and not a single post ranks for a keyword relevant to their product + service offerings. Internal linking is also non-existent... there is no pillar page / subtopic cluster structure (which is the strategy going forward).

Currently, I am doing an audit of all existing posts, based on the lack of value-added content for the reader and metrics showing they have no value - learning towards "retiring" (deleting) the entire existing blog.

Has anyone dealt with a situation like this before?

My concern is that even though the content provides no value on paper, removing all of it could hurt the site's rankings overall.

Although the blogs themselves don't rank for anything, the homepage ranks top #5 for a handful of valuable terms.

One idea is tossing a no-index on the entire blog and seeing what happens to homepage rankings.

Curious about some other expert insight on this.

 

[ElizabethRule]

Great question and topic!

I don't see any issue in deleting old blog posts, granted you 301 redirect them to the most relevant page on your site (whether the homepage, blog hub page, a service page, location page etc). I would hesitate to just add a no-index tag, especially if the overall goal is to clean up the blog pages. A no-index tag is just a "suggestion" to Google and doesn't guarantee the pages fall out of Google's index. It will take more time to redirect the URLs but I think it's worth it in the end and provides more value overall, especially if these blog pages happen to have any links pointing to them (sounds like they do not though).

Either way I don't think it would hurt rankings for the homepage - unless there are internal links on the homepage pointing to any of the blog pages you are 301ing or no-indexing. If thats the case, remove those links before doing anything.

 

[cfazio]

Great question and topic!

I don't see any issue in deleting old blog posts, granted you 301 redirect them to the most relevant page on your site (whether the homepage, blog hub page, a service page, location page etc). I would hesitate to just add a no-index tag, especially if the overall goal is to clean up the blog pages. A no-index tag is just a "suggestion" to Google and doesn't guarantee the pages fall out of Google's index. It will take more time to redirect the URLs but I think it's worth it in the end and provides more value overall, especially if these blog pages happen to have any links pointing to them (sounds like they do not though).

Either way I don't think it would hurt rankings for the homepage - unless there are internal links on the homepage pointing to any of the blog pages you are 301ing or no-indexing. If thats the case, remove those links before doing anything.

Thanks for your response!

The only ones in the "delete" bin provide no valuable user content, have 0 organic clicks, 0 GA4 views, have 0 backlinks, and rank for 0 keywords in the past 12 months.

Sounds like we should still 301 redirect them - does it matter if the 301 target is not relevant to the post topic?

Seems like any of the 301s on the "delete" content would be either the homepage or blog archive.