Neil Patel said that it might be a good SEO action to delete the posts that have no or quite low-traffic blog posts. Anyone of you deleted posts with no or low traffic and it helped your blog?
What do you think about this idea?
Can you explain how that is meant to help SEO? It seems a very odd idea to me.
Who on earth is Neil Patel? Is he a credible source of the stature of Google, or just another self-appointed âSEO Expertâ?
If the low-traffic blog posts contain good quality content, Iâd always want to keep them. Iâd only remove them if the content was of low quality and likely to get the overall blog penalised for some reason - nothing to do with traffic volumes.
1 Like
For instance, I posted a collection of Google Chrome Experiments. I wrote an intro of 250+ words and I added 15 screenshots and I linked to each of them. Perhaps, Google considered that I added a few lines of text just to create backlinks to these websites.
Neil Patel - yeah, itâs a self-appointed SEO expert, but he worked with many-many huge brands. I believe that these brands didnât invest money in someone like meâŚ
You havenât answered my question regarding the supposed benefits of removing low-traffic posts.
The example you gave seems to be of a (possibly) low-quality post, which is a different matter. Low traffic does not necessarily mean low quality.
My idea is that Google will not consider my blog as a spammy website after removing that article. I think that search engines may not like a post with 250 words and many backlinks.
Did you add rel="nofollow" to the <a href...> tags for your backlinks? Without that, Google may think that page is a link farm.
But the point TechnoBear raised is a good one. Itâs unlikely that removing a low-traffic blog post is going to improve your Google ranking. Iâm not an SEO expert, so, maybe this is something new, but, it just doesnât make any sense.
thanks for your idea. I used no-follow links within a few articles, but I used do follow links for the majority of blog posts. I am wondering if Google wouldnât consider the posts with do follow links as part of a link farm strategy.
I consulted Google Seach Console and I donât have any message in this respect.
If you have a good number of blog posts, and only that one which has a high link-to-text ratio, then Google is hardly likely to consider your whole site as âSpammyâ. As @OhMonty says, you can add nofollow attributes to the links if you are concerned about them.
Again, the issue here seems to be the quality of the post, rather than the level of traffic. If youâre unhappy with the quality, then go ahead and remove or improve the post, but that one post is going to have little or no influence on the way your other pages rank.
1 Like
If the links are to good quality sites, and are relevant to your articles, then there is no reason for Google (or any other search engine) to regard them as link farming. If you are deliberately including links just for the sake of it, then yes, that is link farming.
1 Like
Iâm wondering if what NP means is like âniche focusâ.
For example, if I have interest in Shoes, Bears, Chocolate, Candles, JavaScript etc. and have a blog with good posts on each, the chances are that most visitors will not have the same interest in all of the diverse topics. So if I notice that Shoes is low traffic, or if Bears is high traffic, it could be beneficial to âtrimâ the blog to not have Shoes or even have only Bears.
I donât know if Google would then consider the blog to be more of an authority and give it better result positioning, but it might.
2 Likes
I had the same problem. I would just write better, longer content. Itâs been proven that longer content on average ranks higher. Just remember quality is key
Yes deleting old blog posts with low or no traffic helps a lot in case of SEO. And I have figured out the answer finally. Google or other search engines work in a particular pattern. When you have a website with hundreds of articles and half of them are starving on low traffic problem, Google tends to mark them as poorly trafficked articles. And you websiteâs rank is decided by summing up the average of all of your articles. Thus, if you have poorly trafficked articles, the average will be low too. So, it is better to delete them. Happy to help!
Can you quote a Google source to back up this assertion?
Can you also explain how Google would know what level of traffic your articles are getting? Google does not use Analytics data in search ranking, and in any case, not every site has Google Analytics installed.
Anyway, I wouldnât delete any of my posts just because itâs receiving low traffic.
Just make sure you use the no follow tag on your links and also minimum number of words for an optimised SEO article should be 300 and not 250. I think thatâs one reason you are having low traffic on that post because Google doesnât see it as a quality content
I would rather recycle it.
It saves you the time and trouble of trying to come up with a new content and it gives your post another shot at being viewed more. There are tons of articles that tells you how important recycling content is. look it up.
Hi there,
you should focus more on the quality aspects instead of any other elements.