Looking for SEO advice - unwanted traffic to old pages

Marketing & promotion
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Hi there. I’ve got a website on Ghost Pro at dylan.tweney.com. I’ve had a website at this URL for many years, and a few old pages are still generating traffic.

tl;dr: Can I delete a page that’s attracting traffic I don’t want without hurting my domain authority?

One of my old posts is this one, which I wrote about 5 years ago to demonstrate why email authentication was so urgently needed (I was working for an email authentication startup at the time): How to Fake an Email From Almost Anyone in Under 5 Minutes – dylan tweney

Because of the click-baity headline, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic, but it’s clear that it’s mostly from scammers who are Googling for ways to send more fake email, and Google sends them to this page.

Sometimes these visitors sign up for my newsletter, using suspicious-looking email addresses.

I don’t want this traffic and I don’t want these subscribers.

Here’s my question: If I delete this page (which presumably has good SEO), will that hurt the overall ranking of my site?

How can I get rid of this unwanted traffic without hurting my domain’s overall standing? However slight it may be, it is still something, right?

I’m looking for advice, please.

Thank you!

1 Like
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Hi @DylanT, I am not an expert in SEO, but what I would do I would replace a content inside the article and maybe place instead a message like “Sorry guys, the article is archived”

2 Likes
4

@DylanT, You have two options:

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Personally, I have just deleted posts from my site without hesitation. Why you may ask? Pageviews isn’t something I care about and if the article is very outdated or missing a bunch of things (and I can’t be bothered worrying about fixing it) then it just gets deleted.

Out of interest, how many articles do you have that fall into this category?

Finally, from a ranking perspective, I would doubt it unless the question above is a large number.

2 Likes
9

Deleting a page does not affect the domain’s ranking.

you can redirect to a similar page or simply use 410 to remove your page from Google’s index

14

Hi Dylan,

Have you create new pages similar to old pages? if yes then should apply 301 permanent redirection to keep your authority, ranking and traffic.

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I am deleting my post from my site and it doesn’t affect the domain ranking at all

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I think just update the content, or redirect it to a more relevant page so you keep the SEO value while filtering out the wrong audience.

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You can either redirect the post or delete it. Deleting it won’t hurt your overall ranking of the site, but any links or rankings tied to that URL will be gone. A 301 redirect is the safer move. You point it to a related page and keep most of that value, just without the traffic you don’t want.