Right way to delete and update old blog-posts?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

Rand Fishkin once tweeted about success story of Quickbooks blog as they deleted their old and outdated content to show only high quality content to their audience. We are planning to implement the same strategy to our blog which consists of 800+ blog-posts. I'm just wondering the best way to proceed on this and planning to follow as below. Please correct me if I'm wrong and if there are any better steps of follow:

Get the list of blog-posts.

• Check the traffic of each blog-post.
• If the blog-post needs to be existed, update any info on the blog.
• If the blog no more needed, do I need to delete or noindex or redirect?

What's the better way to measure the success?

Thanks

[sarahwalsh]

So, what we do at our seo agency, is we don’t tend to delete old blog posts, as there might be links leading to that page or article, try instead improving the page, rewriting the text, writing the text in a white hat way, making the page/ blog post better quality. We done this for business which sells, garden room bars, and we have helped the company to gain many more sales.

[Everett]

Hello VTMoz,

To answer your question, "it depends". Have you read this post yet?

https://moz.com/blog/content-audit

Look at this section:

https://moz.com/blog/content-audit#13

If it has traffic from external sources (e.g. referral traffic, organic search traffic) you will want to treat it differently than if it didn't have any traffic. Likewise, if it has external links, you'll obviously want to make sure you redirect the URL.

To Martijn's point, just make sure you do your research here (i.e. content audit) before pruning content from your site. It can be easy to make a mistake and do more harm than good if you're not careful. For example, I've seen situations where an entire section was removed from the site because it didn't have any traffic, but many of those pages had links so when they were removed the site's rankings, as a whole, suffered.

But if you have a bunch of outdated, unlinked, low quality content pages, this could be just what you need to revitalize your site and consolidate ranking factors, such as external and internal links, into fewer pages for more benefit.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

I would ask myself the question, what is the additional benefit of updating/removing old content. In the end, don't forget that Quickbooks has an insane high domain authority due to the fact that they've been doing a fair share of stuff for years. I'd say the same strategy wouldn't always work for many other companies. In the end, things are only relevant in your case if it makes sense to update your content.

Martijn.