I’ve been doing a ton of maintenance on waltinpa.com lately and honestly it’s been a long time coming. The short version is that I spent a couple of weeks noindexing old blog posts that had nothing to do with motorcycles and the early results are pretty encouraging. If you’ve got a blog that’s wandered through a few different topics over the years, this one might be worth a read.
Table of Contents
How waltinpa.com Started
This site goes back to 2009. It started as a personal blog because I needed a creative outlet outside of a cigar review website I was running at the time called stogiereview.com
. Between me and a couple of friends, we were pushing out so much cigar content that I just felt burned out. So I started a personal blog just to talk about whatever else I was into.
Over the years that meant beers, books, health stuff, archery, competitive shooting. At one point I got elected vice president of my archery club so the content even had a stretch where it leaned into running a club and the admin side of things. It was all over the place, and that was fine at the time because it was just for me.
When I Decided to Go All In on Motorcycles
A couple of years ago I got into motorcycles and decided I wanted to make it a real thing. I rebranded waltinpa.com to be motorcycle focused so that if you landed here you knew right away what this site was about. I started paying attention to the stats and honestly expected to see some crossover traffic from YouTube, where the channel was picking up a little traction.
That crossover never happened.
I didn’t think too hard about it for a while, but recently I started digging into it. I pulled up the analytics, fed the data into AI, and explained the situation. What it told me was pretty eye opening.
What AI Found When I Looked at My Analytics
The feedback was basically this: your domain authority is solid because the site has been around for a long time, but Google doesn’t really know what you are. It sees a site that has produced content on a wide range of topics and it can’t consistently send you to the right audience. You’re all over the place, and that’s hurting you.
The fix? Clean it up. The options were to delete the old off-topic content, make it private, or noindex it so Google wouldn’t serve it to searchers while I could still keep it on the site.
Deleting it was never on the table for me. A lot of that old stuff is personal. I want to be able to go back and look at it. I want my kids to be able to see what I was into. Maybe even my grandkids someday. So noindexing old blog posts was the clear move. Keep everything, just tell Google to ignore the stuff that doesn’t fit.
Why That Process Takes Forever
Here’s the thing about noindexing old blog posts. The actual action is simple. Open the post, click a button in your SEO plugin, close it. That’s it.
The problem is scale. Since 2009 this site has accumulated enough content to fill 180 blog pages at six posts per page. I had to open every single one, decide if it was motorcycle content or not, and noindex the ones that weren’t. Page by page, over a couple of weeks, chipping away at it a little at a time.
Not complicated. Just tedious.
What the Results Look Like So Far
On the surface the numbers look rough. Search traffic is down. Clicks are down. Most of the metrics are trending the wrong direction. But that’s expected when you pull a ton of content out of Google’s index.
The part that actually matters is engagement. Instead of people landing on the site and leaving in a few seconds, they’re now spending two and a half to three minutes reading. That tells me the people who are finding the site are actually finding what they were looking for.
The YouTube vs. Blog Gap
One thing AI flagged in my data that really drove the point home: my Yamaha MT-09 SP review on YouTube has over 101,000 views and still pulls traffic every single month. That same content in written form on this site was barely registering. Meanwhile, my top performing post was an IDPA concealment garment article from years ago, and even that traffic wasn’t great.
That’s the clearest possible example of why this needed to happen.
Now that the cleanup is done, the motorcycle content is rising to the top and the unrelated stuff is fading out. Google is starting to see waltinpa.com as a source for motorcycle information and not just random stuff. That’s exactly what I was going for.
It Takes Longer Than You Think But It’s Worth Doing
If you’ve got a blog that’s been around for a while and it’s covered a lot of ground, noindexing old blog posts that don’t fit your current direction is probably one of the better things you can do for your SEO. It’s not exciting work. But the early results here are real.
I’ll keep an eye on how this plays out and report back as the numbers develop. In the meantime if you’ve done something similar on your own site I’d be curious what your experience looked like. Drop it in the comments.
Ride With Me
If you want to follow along as I figure all this stuff out, subscribe to the WaltInPA YouTube channel. I’d also appreciate it if you shared this post with a friend who rides or runs their own channel or blog. And if you want to hang out with the community, come join us in the WaltInPA Discord.
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