In the last part of this 5 part series, we are going to talk about how to clean up old assets and inventory the ones that are uncrawlable. We will first get started by talking about old best practices, then move on the assets that you can inventory and reuse.
Previous Best Practices
The below assets used to be best practice in the SEO world, but now the game has changed significantly:
- Flash
- It made the Internet pretty
- Compiled Scripts
- Worked on all computers until HTML was standardized
- WAP & Mobile Viewport Tags
- WAP was the original Mobile site infrastructure
- Having 2 sites with mobile viewport tags to send people to mobile site versus your regular website was best practice
- Compressed Images and Videos
- Compressing images and videos in the low bandwidth days was best practice
- Dynamically Generated Sites
- Generating a website from a database
All of the above technical assets were the way to do it, but none of these are the best way to do it any longer. But, although the above are not best practice, you can still inventory them and reuse them.
Inventory Assets
The first step to inventory your assets by making a list of assets Google cannot see. There is a specific list of file types, like Flash, that Google cannot see, therefore it looks blank to them. You can view a list of file types Google can see and which they can interact with here. Some of these include but are not limited to: CGI, ZIP, WAV, AVI, MOV, WMV, MP3, MP4.
To find these assets, you can find these by using XENU-generated worksheets, as well as find them by searching your site and searching by applications, audio files, or flash files.
Reuse these assets
You can reuse anything that has not been crawled and indexed by Google. For example, if you have old files that has a lot of great information, you can pull the content out of them and post somewhere else.
Google cannot read these old flash and CGI (compiled scripts) files. Search the web using a snippet of text to ensure this content is not published or indexed anywhere else. If it is not being used, unpack the files, using File Juicer, and post it as text and images on a new page.
You can also turn audio and video to text content by creating transcripts from these old files and then posting them as blog entries or on a related landing page. Alternately, if the audio or video is still useful, repurpose it as an offer.
If you do not know if you should repurpose or not, ask yourself if it will help show your authority in your space:
- Deep, historical perspective = authority
- Reuse anything interesting and relevant for authority
- Think about your landing pages and conversion funnels – what old assets support them? Is it going to raise your websites authority?
If you have a bunch of uncrawlable data/pages, follow the above steps to ensure it is getting the recognition and authority it deserves.