Should Blog Articles Always Be Visible To The User?

[finnegan]

SEO is not my thing so this will be a newb question.

I have a site with a blog section that has interesting articles which I also post to my FB group for subs to read. However, I also have blog articles I need to write that rank for keywords that would not be interesting reads and are simply people searching out how to do something that isn't very involved. In addition to not being interesting enough to post to my FB group, many of them are overlapping when it comes to the keyword and are simply variations of the same keyword phrase.

Do I need to display these boring and repetitive articles on my blog or is there a way to just have them rank and be discovered in the search engines?

 

[chubes]

You could create a custom post type for just the "boring and repetitive" posts and then use that to filter them out of archives, search and indexes.

You could probably do this via categories too. Either way it's going to involve some custom code or a plugin.

That said, the posts would still be "visible," because Google isn't going to rank them if they can't be accessed via links on your site.

You can use these means to get them out of the user's face but they still have to be accessible for anyone who seeks them out or the purpose of having them is defeated.

 

[finnegan]

If I can simply use KW clustering and stick the KWDs all in one article that's viewable on my blog, is that the better way to go here than creating separate articles for each KWD and hiding articles that are too similar to the original?

 

[bernard]

You have several options here, the easiest is just to put your blog posts in a separate category to your seo articles and then only show your blog category on your blogroll.

Then you can have a link to your seo articles elsewhere, like in the footer or strategically sprinkled through your actual blog posts.

You can also do as suggested and create a custom post type and have it be a "Knowledge Base", I might do this, then link it at the end of your blog posts "Looking for more? Check out our knowledge base". It could be after the "Relevant posts" widget if you use that.

If it will work as well, depends on many factors. This kind of "hidden" content used to not rank well, because it is too disconnected linkwise from the rest of the site, but with Google focusing on authority now, if you have a strong site it might work very well. As long as the content is of some quality and relevant.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Definitely don't orphan them, meaning they're completely disconnected from the rest of the site and only discoverable through a search engine or sitemap. You need internal links pointing to them if you want them to perform decently in Google. There's a lot of creative ways of doing this, with the most common being a sitewide footer link. Giving the posts some contextual links between each other and from your "normal" content wouldn't be a bad idea to really share the page rank juice around.

many of them are overlapping when it comes to the keyword and are simply variations of the same keyword phrase.

You're going to run into keyword cannibalization issues, where when two or more pages are optimized for the same set of keywords, neither rank well. You'd think Google would choose the best one, but nope, they tend to just not rank either of them very well. It's silly but the reality.

 

[finnegan]

Definitely don't orphan them, meaning they're completely disconnected from the rest of the site and only discoverable through a search engine or sitemap. You need internal links pointing to them if you want them to perform decently in Google. There's a lot of creative ways of doing this, with the most common being a sitewide footer link. Giving the posts some contextual links between each other and from your "normal" content wouldn't be a bad idea to really share the page rank juice around.


You're going to run into keyword cannibalization issues, where when two or more pages are optimized for the same set of keywords, neither rank well. You'd think Google would choose the best one, but nope, they tend to just not rank either of them very well. It's silly but the reality.

By "sitewide footer link", do you mean one footer link going to a category page that houses all of these "hidden posts?"

Would it be a better idea to just combine these similar KWDs into one post that will hopefully rank each of them for their own KWD?

 

[Ryuzaki]

By "sitewide footer link", do you mean one footer link going to a category page that houses all of these "hidden posts?"

Yes, that's what I mean. You could even use CSS to make it smaller, whatever you want to do to avoid people visiting it from anywhere that's not Google. What I would do before I do any of this is check what my pageviews per session metric is. Maybe people don't even go beyond the first article anyways and all of this isn't worthwhile. Tends to be the case with Google and Social traffic.

Would it be a better idea to just combine these similar KWDs into one post that will hopefully rank each of them for their own KWD?

Probably. Either combining the keywords into one post, if they're that similar, or not posting them at all, is better than them cannibalizing each other, since that's a net negative even for existing posts.