If you’ve been running your blog or website for some time now, you probably have a lot of posts that are irrelevant, redundant, or possibly even downright wrong. As an example, I don’t think anyone today will gain any value from a post I wrote about domains being auctioned on GreatDomains in April! Looking through the 180 posts I had, it wasn’t very hard to find posts which explained the same thing. In some cases, having 2 posts on the matter was redundant, in other cases my server side stats suggested one of the pages was getting little search engine traffic and few page views.

I went through all my posts and looked at both their page view and entry statistics. If a post hasn’t been on the first page of my blog during the month of June, entry numbers represent search engine traffic and traffic from inbound links. With 2200+ search engine referrals so far this month and 102,000+ page views on 180 posts, the average post should be getting around 12 search engine referrals per month and 567 page views — page views should be lower on this which weren’t created in June due to the fact a substantial amount of clicks comes from bot being on the homepage and being seen on Domaining.com.

I had 70 posts which had received 0-3 search engine referrals and under 100 page views — when this site averages 3500+ page views per day, a post which didn’t manage to even get viewed 100 times over the course of a month clearly isn’t a very popular post. One of the things I recently did was get my posts categorized — it’s a nice way to help visitors find what they’re looking for, however it does have the unfortunate side effect of indiscriminately awarding link juice. Now why would I want as much link juice flowing to a post which receives 3 search engine referrals monthly as one that receives 30?

Pagerank sculpting hasn’t died with the introduction of nofollow — it just requires thinking about things differently. If you look at my category section on the homepage, you’ll notice there’s no uncategorized category. That’s because my category section isn’t actually a category section — it’s a text widget that I happened to name “Categories” and place hyperlinks to where I wanted link juice flowing. So if I don’t want unpopular posts stealing link juice from the popular ones, I simply categorize them as “Uncategorized” and they never get seen again. Some unpopular posts still have a purpose — an LLLL.com price guide from 2007 for example is highly inaccurate today and hence is of little use to most visitors, however someone curious about how the LLLL.com market has performed since the LLLL.com buyout might find such a post extremely useful. Rather than link to such posts normally, I created an “Old LLLL.com price guides” post and placed links in it to all of the older LLLL.com price guides in.

My blog now has 110 posts instead of 180 and many of these 110 aren’t featured in the main category listings, meaning more juice flowing to the pages I want it to flow to. The posts I deleted were all 301 redirected, so I haven’t lost any link juice by doing this and can now spend that link juice where I want to — that’s even better than nofollow because now I can spend the link juice even the page that otherwise would have been nofollowed has accumulated. As for search engine referrals, they’re actually up about 5% so far since I made the change — it almost seems counterintuitive that you’d get more traffic by deleting posts which were getting traffic, however that’s what I’ve done and that’s what my result has been.

Because I haven’t monetized this blog, this is really just experimentation to see what the outcome would be. I remember reading about the V7N forum owner moving unpopular posts out of the part of his forum search engines indexed and had quite successful results doing this — 7000 more daily search engine referrals. If I were selling something on this blog, it would only make sense to get rid of pages not converting or converting poorly, so that more traffic flows to pages which are resulting in sales.

Related posts:

1. Increasing Page Views
2. Bounce Rate
3. Social Media’s Effect on Search Engines