Is it okay to delete old blog posts?

[74andsunny]

Hi All,

I'm doing some SEO work on an entertainment (movies/tv/gaming) blog that started in 2011. Their recent articles have gained some popularity due to improved content and marketing, but there is some old stuff from the early days that was poorly written and gets virtually no traffic. These are mostly old news pieces.

Out of approximately 10,000 articles, about 1,000 are receiving the lions share of the traffic. I feel like their good content is getting bogged down in a sea of crap. Would there be any harm in deleting some of those old posts? Is there a best practice for culling content?

Thanks!

[74andsunny]

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Looks like deleting posts could have many unintended consequences. I think I'll hold off for a bit.

[74andsunny]

Thank you for outlining a clear process for me. I will proceed with extreme caution if and when I decide to delete:)

[katemorris]

Check the ones you want to delete to see if there are any backlinks to any of them. If there are, don't delete them yet.

For those with no external links, first check the traffic for the last year. None? Then make sure there are no references (links) to them on your site. Once there are no links to the post, then delete.

If there are external links to the post, either update it and republish (301 redirect to the new URL from the old one), just keep it, or contact the site linking and ask them to change the link to an updated post. Don't waste that link equity!

Hope that helps!

[twitime]

Could you try disabling the posts instead of deleting them entirely?  If things take a turn for the worse you could always enable them again and look into improving the posts instead.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

I would recommend reading this before you do anything: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

I want to do the same - but its a risk to search visibility.

[Sheena_Schleicher]

There probably isn't much harm in deleting them, but I'd also see if there's any way to repurpose some of the pieces or maybe some of the topics are still relevant & can be rewritten/updated to not be "crap." Even if you don't do any updating to those old posts, I would consider archiving the pages (making sure you don't create any duplicate content!) rather than deleting them as they're likely influencing how Google understands the overall context of your site. I would review the content relevancy report in Webmaster Tools to see how Google understands your site... Click on any of the listed terms to see if those old posts are where your top KWs are occurring - should help you decide on keeping or nixing some pages.

Hope this helps!