Best Practice to Remove a Blog

[Bucky]

Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered

Hi,

I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site.

I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are

1. 404 Them:  Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant.

2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed.

Thoughts?

Thanks

PS

A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404

[DougRoberts]

Hiya,

Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:

I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.

You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.

The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.

How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.

Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?

If you decide to remove you content:

Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.

Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.

I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.

Hope this helps!

[KaneJamison]

A few other questions for you first:

• Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
• Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
• Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?

A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:

• No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
• No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).

[Bucky]

The blog has little value, with almost no user traffic.

It will be redesigned in a subdomain on the site.

I am only concerned with crawlers/google crawlers etc..and being penalized for tons of missing pages by 404'ing

There is nothing linking to the blog

[KaneJamison]

In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.

On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.

[DougRoberts]

Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.

[Bucky]

I agree also. Thank you

As far as subdomain or subfolder, I see no difference. Can you explain Kane?

[KaneJamison]

Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.

Take wordpress.com as an example:

• surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
• surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
• surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***

In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.

By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.