SEO - Adding new content. Advise please.

mojoco · Jun 26, 2012

I'm after some advice about the ever famous bluewidgets.com website

BlueWidgets.com has thirty pages of unique content indexed in Google.

BlueWidgets.com
BlueWidgets.com/redspots
BlueWidgets.com/greenspots

etc

main phrase "blue widgets" is on page 2

The other pages are indexed but do not show in the top 100 results.

The site is having a complete redesign.

The existing site content does not read well to the visitor and I am having a further 30 pages of well written articles.

My question(s) is should I delete the existing poorly written but indexed content completely and publish the new articles ?

Should I leave the existing content pages and add the new content to new pages so that the site now has 60 pages ?

ie:

bluewidgets.com/redspots
and then
bluewidgets.com/moreredspots

Should I add the content to the existing article pages, pushing the old content down the page making the articles twice as long ?

Any other options?

Will be interested to hear your suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Alien · Jun 26, 2012

Interesting question Mo.

Personally I think I'd keep the old articles/content (certainly at first), but not 'publically announce' them to site visitors (e.g. via menu links, other site linking, site map and so on), but keep them intact (with same text and URLs) and in the background so to speak so Google et al can 'see' them - hopefully keeping any of your organic search results etc (if they're worth keeping for the lower quality content?).

Then I'd add the new pages, with new URLs (as per your examples) for these and make sure these are also linked from the relevant older page with an appropriate 'Read More about blue widgets within our latest article', etc, etc.

You could always get rid of the old content when hopefully your new stuff is indexed and performing well with organic results, etc? Or just 'archive' this and tuck it away on the site.

I don't think I'd want to mix the old and new copy together, it might detract from your new content too, diluting its value perhaps?

I'm not a SEO pro though, so I expect there's a better way of doing things!

blognetwork · Jun 27, 2012

http://bluewidgets.com/redspots
http://bluewidgets.com/moreredspots

Above pages shows: Sorry, there was an error. Please CLICK HERE for the HOME PAGE

Fresh content works well and it's important to link page from homepage (internal linking).

fenland · Jun 27, 2012

blognetwork said:
http://bluewidgets.com/redspots
http://bluewidgets.com/moreredspots

Above pages shows: Sorry, there was an error. Please CLICK HERE for the HOME PAGE

Fresh content works well and it's important to link page from homepage (internal linking).

Different Gravy that..

peter_w · Jun 27, 2012

Get rid of the old content. If it doesn't read very well then it's going to be harming you from every angle (both conversions and rankings pov).

Where possible just replace the content on redspots page with better content. If you just no longer want the pages, I'd be tempted to 404 them rather than 301, unless they had backlinks on their own.

Take a look at things like your title tag, h tags and overall content on these pages as well. If the title tag is 'Red Spots', the H1 is 'Red Spots' and every other word and backlink coming in is 'red spots' then chances are that's why it's not ranking.