Do old newsletters on my site help with SEO?

LoneMoose · Mar 6, 2024

We publish a monthly newsletter. It is not fancy; it is mostly an aggregate of industry news consisting of blurbs and links to articles on other sites. The newsletter is in HTML format on our server and is indexed by search engines.

My site SEO audits show that many older newsletters have broken external links. No surprise that a site would take down a post after 4+ years, but broken links are not good.

Am I benefitting in SEO/SERP from having HTML documents with no real content linking to external sites? I am trying to decide if I should go through each issue and remove the broken links or archive the issues much sooner.

tazarbm · Mar 8, 2024

I don't think having those newsletters will help you rank better, but it CAN impact your rankings negatively because of the broken links.

If you can / know how, try to find a solution for your site to automatically tag broken links with noindex, or even remove the content that contain those links since I assume that content won't do anyone any good if their source is gone...

Better yet, check the analytics and see how many of your visitors actually visit those newsletters and if that traffic results in conversions of any kind (repeat visitors, subscribers, sales, social media engagement, etc), and if they don't (or don't at the levels you'd want them to), simply delete the newsletters.

I know that this might be a tough decision to make (I had a site like yours once, and I can see the value in having content from all over the places in my industry on my website), but if it keeps you from ranking and doesn't offer any conversions it makes more sense to just get rid of it.

LoneMoose · Mar 12, 2024

tazarbm said:
I don't think having those newsletters will help you rank better, but it CAN impact your rankings negatively because of the broken links.

If you can / know how, try to find a solution for your site to automatically tag broken links with noindex, or even remove the content that contain those links since I assume that content won't do anyone any good if their source is gone...

Better yet, check the analytics and see how many of your visitors actually visit those newsletters and if that traffic results in conversions of any kind (repeat visitors, subscribers, sales, social media engagement, etc), and if they don't (or don't at the levels you'd want them to), simply delete the newsletters.

I know that this might be a tough decision to make (I had a site like yours once, and I can see the value in having content from all over the places in my industry on my website), but if it keeps you from ranking and doesn't offer any conversions it makes more sense to just get rid of it.

Thanks

outreach · Mar 16, 2024

If broken links point to external websites, consider reaching out to the website owner to notify them of the issue. Alternatively, remove or replace broken external links with relevant alternatives.

Spinethetic · Mar 18, 2024

I would check to see if the archive.org wayback machine has archived copies of the webpages you're linking out to, and just link to those instead.

NeedMyLink · Mar 19, 2024

Broken links hurt SEO, so it's worth cleaning up your old newsletters. Updating or removing broken links can improve user experience and potentially boost rankings. Consider the effort vs. the SEO value of those pages. In my experience, a clean-up led to noticeable improvements in traffic and rankings.

Do old newsletters on my site help with SEO?

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