Should I delete old or unrelevant posts in my blog? (Panda Update question)

[wellnesswooz]

I have a website where I post articles every few weeks.. Should I remove the outdated and unrevelant posts? I fear that google might punish my website in the Panda update.

[NakulGoyal]

EGOL is right on. I would also think about what %age of your blog posts have search engine traffic ? Look at last 30/60/90 days maybe ? Is there any seasonal content ? Factor all those things and then decide. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to update them. Sometimes delete them and redirect them to an updated/newer article. It might also sometimes make sense to merge multiple similar topic articles.

Think from a user's perspective and not SE perspective and you'll be good as long as you are thinking about SEO best-practices, which it sounds like you are.

[EGOL]

Consider these things.....

-- Do those posts pull traffic from search or other websites?

-- Can you do anything valuable with that traffic?

-- Do those pages have any external links?

If your answer is "no" to all of these questions then simply delete them?

If your answer is "yes" to some then you must decide to keep, delete, redirect or improve.

I have a blog that gets lots of temporary content and I place it in folders such as mysite.com/blog/2012/02/

Those dated folders make it easy for me to redirect entire folders when I retire content - and I retire over a thousand posts per year.

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Now, here is a little complexity... maybe you should not be indexing these posts if they are trivial, duplicate content or have some other problem that Panda might be picky about.