: Is there differences between deleting low quality articles vs no-indexing low quality articles SEO wise? I am auditing the SEO for a site. I found a few low quality articles which I think Google

@Michele947

It would be pretty confident that Google would be advocating the removal of low-quality articles.
webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Also from a visitor perspective why would you want to keep have low-quality articles?

or

The method does Google Love? in what sense?

What causes the robots meta tag with no-index? be removed from.

One puts the URL offline, the other leaves it active and
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en&ref_topic=4598466&vid=0-307059308546-1512715863503

Vote Up Vote Down

@Nimeshi995

You can take either path here. What matters is how you go about it. Let's say you decide to delete those articles. That should be fine. Just make sure you 301 redirect those URL's to something better that's hopefully contextually similar. Take those articles out of the XML sitemap, too, and resubmit the sitemap. Before doing this, it may be worth it to check your web traffic to those URL's in whichever Analytics system you use, and to check the inbound link profile of those pages in whatever SEO software you prefer.

Let's say you noindex them, and take them out of the sitemap. The search index effect should be pretty much similar. The articles will eventually be removed. The downside here is that search engines will still be able to crawl those articles and see the low quality content on your site. You could add a nofollow too, but be careful not to cut off parts of your site or any of your legitimate links that way. What's worse is that your users will see low quality content. Some may link out to it, which is a waste for everyone. So you'll get the pages out of the index, but you may have UX issues left. My recommendation is to go with the "delete and redirect URL" option. After all, if the content is poor, why have it up there at all?

Vote Up Vote Down