I have over 1,000 blog posts published on this website. And although I feel that the majority of them are worthwhile pieces of content, there are plenty that are simply too old or have been corrupted over time. So, it’s time to delete these older posts and move on.
It’s sad, as a lot of the content I wanted to keep were my first serious articles. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t like it when the majority of your posts are less than ideal, outdated, abandoned, or missing huge swaths of information.
According to the experts, these older posts need to go. Since I am averse to getting rid of anything, I don’t know if it’s a wise decision, as it’s never been done before. So, the coming year will be a kind of experiment to see if deleting older posts is ideal in some situations.
Why Delete Those Old Posts?
Although the older articles helped me achieve 1,000 published posts, a lot of them are problematic. In fact, a large portion of this website is not indexed by Google. This means that for visitors to find those old posts, they have to do some digging.
If I want to reach more people who want to learn blogging, self-publishing, and freelance writing, I need to make the site more accessible. To reach more people on the Internet with a blog, you gotta play by Google’s rules.
Not to mention writing about topics people want to know.
So, why am I removing some of the older pieces of content?
Corrupted During Various Moves
Originally, this website was driven by the Content Management System, Joomla. I moved it over to WordPress before moving to another web host. During all of these transitions, a lot of the older articles became corrupted.
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch that they were essentially broken until recently.
It appears that a lot of articles are missing either the beginning or the ending halves of the content. Some are even a jumbled mess of a word salad, as paragraphs and sentences merged together.
So, these are obviously problematic for anyone interested in the topics, and are why they are not indexed in the search results page.
Irrelevant or Outdated
I started this blog back in December of 2012. Since then, I’ve covered a myriad of topics for all kinds of writing. However, a lot of them are either no longer relevant for today’s society or are grossly outdated.
Because I have such a busy lifestyle, a lot of those posts simply didn’t get proper updates, which I’ll go over here in a moment.
Not only is irrelevant and outdated information bad for Google, but it’s also bad for your brand. Sharing information that is incorrect could mislead your readers and ultimately destroy your reputation in the field.
Low Quality (According to Google)
One of the worst things you can do for your blog is write “thin” content. This is when there simply isn’t enough information to warrant a person visiting your website.
For instance, let’s say that you want to write about “making money from home.” Well, there is no way you’re going to provide enough information about the topic in just 500 words. There are a lot of subtopics and points you’ll miss that people will want to know.
Missing the first half of an article will also trigger the thin-content issue.
You want to cover as many points about the topic as you can think of if you want Google to index the page. Of course, not all topics will require a 2,000-word blog post. Some topics are just going to be narrow, anyway.
But if your competitors are cranking out 3,000 words about the topic as the top page result in Google, you’ll need to surpass what they are providing.
Possible Duplicates
Duplicate content happens, especially if you’re managing a blog with a lot of content. Well, Google not only hates duplicate articles, but you’re also competing with yourself for the same keyphrase.
Merging what you can to create a longer post is ideal. Sometimes, you’ll find better points in either post that would work well together. Find the one that gets the most traffic and merge the duplicate with it.
I’m not sure how many articles might be duplicated on this site. So, it’s going to be a fun months-long chore to go through each post one by one.
Keep in mind that I’ve been writing content long before I started tracking keyphrases in Yoast SEO. That means I’m not sure what each post is going to focus on until I read through it.
Improving SEO as a Whole
A lot of experts attest to the impact of deleting old and irrelevant content. According to some experts, the visitor growth potential of getting rid of older content ranges between 30% and 150%, depending on the site.
Of course, a lot of the websites these experts are viewing for data are considered massive in terms of content. We’re talking sites that generate close to 10,000 visits per month with the content they have indexed.
WriterSanctuary is nowhere near that popular. Still, I plan on running a case study to see if deleting old posts makes a difference for smaller blogs. I have a few that I can clean up, so the information I gather will be spread across three very different industries.
My biggest fear is that I inadvertently make things worse and lose even more traffic. It’s bad enough that I have to contend with AI Overviews wiping out 50% of my visitors.
Updating Those with Valid Topics
Updating is still a viable alternative to deleting older content, especially if the posts are still relevant. I’ve proven this once before for a client, but that was back in 2018. So, I am going to run a new case study to see just how viable it is today.
A lot has happened since those days, and the Google algorithm is far more picky. Plus, the onset of AI has changed the landscape of creating content, so who knows what will happen to a site as a whole after updating key articles?
I know for a fact that I was targeting high-volume key phrases back in the day. Those are mostly the articles that were broken by the various moves. I’ll research the topics a bit before committing to rewrites, but it’s still a lot of content.
That’s part of the fun of updating old posts. Keyphrases that were high-volume eight years ago may be non-existent today. Even when creating evergreen content, it’s a good idea to make sure that it’s still relevant, as a lot can happen as time progresses.
Some of them will get complete rewrites with new pages and URLs, which means I’ll be using the Redirection plugin to redirect links to the new copy. It’s a great tool for WordPress and cuts down the time spent on setting up redirects manually.
What About the Journal Pieces?
I’ve been requested to keep the journal-like blog posts about when I was a full-time writer for content mills like Textbroker. Apparently, they are inspirational.
With the journal pieces, I’m going to leave them be with perhaps a section above the content explaining the piece. Then, I’ll set the posts to “noindex” to prevent Google from crawling them. Hopefully, that will be enough to help with SEO.
I kind of agree with some of the sentiments regarding the ultra-old posts. A lot of these were written in 2013 and 2014, and it’s kind of neat to see how much I’ve progressed from those first days of becoming a paid professional writer.
I’m also thinking about putting them into either their own category or using a tag to keep them organized on a page somewhere. That way, they are easier to access should someone be curious.
In any case, I’m not deleting the old journal articles at the moment. Let’s hope it doesn’t come back to bite me as a blogger later on.
Building the Blog Includes Spring Cleaning
I often use buildings as a metaphor for blogging. It’s a similar principle, as your website is essentially digital real estate. And if you want people to visit, you need to make sure your house or business is clean.
In this case, I’ll spend some time cleaning the proverbial yard, dusting, and organizing to make accessing the site easier for everyone.
Right now, it looks like a hoarder lives here.
The trick is knowing which articles to delete and which to update. A lot of this has to do with whether anyone is reading the post or even if Google has it indexed in the search engine. Either way, keep the topics that have potential for improving traffic by doing some research.
Not everything older than five years needs to be removed. Sometimes, a fresh coat of paint can make it look more inviting.
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