About a year ago, I went through my entire blog (started in 2009) to see what was hiding in the far off pages. I found old photos of my cats, links to websites that no longer exist, ramblings about random stuff, and more. This was all fine when I launched, but as an established business, it no longer worked.
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What complicated it more was that I kept my website and transitioned my business in 2014. This website was originally for my wedding photography business. Since I didn’t close one business and open another, but instead spent almost two years doing both, it made sense to start adding my design work to my current website at the time. Eventually, I choose to focus solely on website design, and my site was a complete mess organization wise.
I had many pages that were no longer relevant, and certainly piles of blog posts.
Even in better circumstances, where your website has always been devoted to your one business, you can end up with old posts, that just don’t make sense anymore. Clients often ask me how to handle this.
Do Not Delete (yet)
I sometimes here from a client “oh I’ll just delete the old posts”. You definitely don’t want to do this. Search engines have a record of your website and if there are suddenly 20 posts or pages missing, that’s not good for your rankings. You may also have linked your posts to social media or other websites, and then that link would be broken.
Make a List
Go through your website and create a spreadsheet (or list of any type) with the name of each post you want to delete and where you want viewers to end up instead. For example, if you have a blog post talking about the best wedding venues in NYC from 2015, you may want to redirect that to a new post about wedding venues. If you don’t have another post, then maybe redirect it to your blog home page or your another page about weddings. Go for something related, when possible.
Redirect or Repurpose?
In the example above, you actually repurpose and update your post instead of removing it. You can add a line “updated on Jan 4, 2023” and adjust the topic to be current. I’d recommend taking this route if the post was popular the first time. You can tweak it and reuse it. You can even change the date of publish to current, if you want it front and center again.
Redirect your Old Posts
You’ll need a plugin on your website to redirect. Yoast Premium has it built in, but Redirection is a free WordPress plugin and does a good job. If you created a spreadsheet and you have quite a few posts, you can upload it to the plugin. If you just have 5-10, then it’s likely quicker to just manually add the redirects into the plugin settings.
Unpublish
Once you’ve redirected, you can unpublish / change to draft, or completely delete your posts.
How to Decide
It depends on your brand, and your business. I’d definitely think about strategy, marketing and SEO when figuring out if you should keep or remove the old stuff. From an SEO perspective, Google does prefer content to be relevant to your main topic. So if your a wedding florist and have a blog post about a flower festival, you can keep that. If you’re a business coach and ten years ago felt the need to blog regularly no matter what (as some of us did), that flower festival likely needs to go.
If you need assistance with this, I offer Strategy Sessions where we can work through something like this together. Send me a note to learn more.
