Question: I am taking over an e-commerce site that has 50 or so bogus posts published over 3 months that have smartly crafted SEO drivel for content. The post images are nonsense but have good alt tags. There is no duplicate content. The author wrote each post for a different keyword phrase. Interestingly, those posts did not bring significant traffic to the site or increase search rankings over that time frame.
Is the site vulnerable to being penalized by Google? If I added the posts to the robots.txt file would the site take an SEO hit? Any thoughts or suggestions?
Answer: If they aren’t helping and are meant to game the search engines, they can only hurt you. I would advise removing them before they do. Once Google sees them as a 404, they should disappear from results. But certainly don’t add them to robots.txt — that tells Google not to crawl the URL. If you want to both keep them and remove them from results, you want a “no index” meta tag (or HTTP header). Yoast’s SEO plugin allows you to choose that per page/post. Do this, and the site should be just fine in regards to SEO.
Nick Ciske – CTO / CISO
Nick has a degree in Multimedia Design and over 25 years of experience working in web development and digital media. Nick specializes in architecting amazing and brilliant application solutions.