Intro from Gail
When a blog has been around for years, or in the case of this one, over 10 years, it is a good idea to clean up some of your older, time-sensitive, less relevant, or weaker content.
But how do you know what to delete? You don’t want to lose any incoming links. Redirecting them helps, but if you remove the content someone originally linked they may still delete your incoming link.
I know many other bloggers and small businesses are struggling to answer this question, too. So I reached out to an expert on the subject, Ahrefs, and asked for a guest post sharing how to decide what content it is safe to delete. This is that post.
How To Decide What Blog Content To Delete
All of us are struggling to increase the search traffic to our blogs. Does it grow slowly no matter how much content you post? How often do you post? Is it nearly four times a week?
We, at Ahrefs, experienced the same issue. The strategy we implemented led to an 89% organic traffic growth in just 3 months.
I won’t tell you about all the strategy stages in order to not make this article too long to read. I will cover only the first one. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, doesn’t it? Let’s make it together.
Sometimes It’s Time to Part with Your Content
Even if you created your content with love and devotion sometimes you need to delete it. We deleted 179,158 words of content at the beginning of the campaign I’ve mentioned above and never regretted it.
By the way, have you ever used this feature available in the admin dashboard of your WordPress blog?
There’s really nothing secret about the ‘Move to Trash’ option. Just wanted to make sure that you know about it.
I must warn you that it’s a pretty devastating step. Why should you take it? Because the rules of the game change and if you want to win, you should adjust to them.
For instance, back in 2013, we posted frequently, wrote articles of a decent quality, 500+ words, targeted to multiple keywords. The tactic “the more content – the better” worked.
Hummingbird Changed Everything
But everything changed with the Hummingbird update. Google started to understand the content itself and not only keywords. Just think about it – nearly 2 million blog posts are created daily, which means that this approach doesn’t work anymore.
The takeaway is that lots of mediocre content will do more harm than good to your blog.
But that’s not all. We must consider that user signals are getting more and more important to Google over time. So all those posts with 0 visits and engagement are not sending it good vibes.
I’m sure there are many posts like these on your blog if it has been around for a while.
Our Personal Experience
When we started to implement the strategy we deleted nearly 300 blog posts.
I know it may sound crazy, but what’s more important for you is to know how we decided which posts to leave and which to get rid of…
What We Did Was Conduct a Content Audit
There was too much content to skim through, so we needed to simplify this process. A low hedge is easily leapt over, isn’t it?
Ok, here’s what we did:
First, we created a spreadsheet and put the URLs of all our blog posts into it.
We recorded the following data for each URL:
- Title
- Word Count
- Views (last 30 days)
- Views From Search (last 30 days)
- Referring Domains
- Author.
We collected the view data from Google Analytics. We collected the data on referring domains using Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool. It helps to grab data for lots of URLs at once.
Our next step was to sort the spreadsheet by several criteria:
a) number of views from search
b) total views
c) referring domains
d) word count
We sorted from the lowest to the highest and ended up with posts that had 0 views and 0 referring domains (links) at the top of the spreadsheet.
Of course, we manually checked each of these posts for the hidden gems and found a couple, by the way.
Then we just highlighted all low-quality articles that performed poorly in red, preparing them for deletion. Here’s what our final spreadsheet version looked like:
We deleted the posts marked in red.
However, we needed to preserve link equity, so we 301 redirected the URLs of the deleted pages with referring domains to either a relevant post or the blog’s home page.
That’s it. I’m sure you would like to get some advice on how to apply the technique to your own blog.
Applying the Tactic To Your Blog
The strategy is applicable only to blogs that have been up and running for some time. They should have a reasonable number of pages (at least 50 of them).
Does your blog match the criteria? Well, it’s time to run a content audit to improve its rankings.
Where should you start? Find low-quality blog posts that are under-performing and require updating or removing. Check them for the hidden gems that might just need a little clean up/renovation/promotion to get them ranking.
Please never forget to think twice before deleting anything because it’s a very tough option.
Side Note: Further reading: The Secrets Of Creating Linkbait Content
Over To You!
Are you struggling to grow your blog’s organic search traffic? Are you ready to give the above strategy a chance? It worked for us, which means that it can work for you, too.
Ok, let’s utter it once again. How to decide what blog content to delete if you love all of your articles? This is no place for our personal ties when it comes to things like SEO, marketing, competition, business, and money.
A good blogger should be guided by targeted audience pains and interests. In other words, cater to people’s needs and wants rather than your personal vanity.
The takeaway is – analyze all the blog posts on your site, reveal those that are just a ballast for your web ship, and get rid of them. This will let your vessel move faster.
The strategy described above takes careful planning, focus, and hard work, but you’ll see that your efforts will be rewarded as soon as the curve in Google Analytics starts to head upwards.
Have any questions / suggestions regarding the strategy? Ready to share your personal experience of applying it? Your comments are welcome right below!
Found this blog post useful? Share it with your friends and colleagues on social networks!
Cheers!
Helga Moreno
Latest posts by Helga Moreno (see all)
- How To Decide What Blog Content To Delete; 89% Traffic Increase - August 26, 2018
Thanks for sharing nice article . I am agree with you but i think a post can be modify, not need to delete for increase traffic. Traffic can be effected after modify post. I had done. Thanks once again.
Good post! What was the outcome? I’m interested in how much the traffic grew by or any organic traffic gains from the 301 redirects.
I think it better to update the old content instead of deleting. But some post is needed to delete if they do not have quality content.
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Thanks for describing the process to audit low-quality content using which we may audit and delete some content to increase traffic. Thanks again for this useful post.
I’m not a fan of deleting content. Even if the content is not evergreen, it’s a record of what you’ve written. Arefs is a company, not a blogger, so there’s a difference.
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Yes, I do like to be able to find information online about useful solutions that have been killed off. They can bring us traffic and help us figure out what we can’t use anymore.
That said, eventually a blog can get so much content in it that it makes sense to possibly delete some of it. The challenge is making sure you don’t end up deleting content with valuable incoming links. Even if you redirect them, they may get removed as no longer relevant when the other site happens to see them.
It is past time serious bloggers got serious about learning SEO, but that really isn’t my thing. I need to do it, but just haven’t made time to learn it or wanted to spend the money on expensive SEO tools.
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Gail, I know you primarily work with local businesses (or am I wrong), most of which don’t have much time to blog, or if they do, they don’t have a lot of content. I know that engagement on the site (time on page, low bounce rate, backlinks) is extremely important for SEO and everyone should be creating content with that goal in mind, but when you have so little content, doesn’t every bit help as long as it’s good quality?
We have to remember that competition is low for SMBs too, often just a couple of handfuls in the 5-10 mile radius they serve. So having an article that gets found and read once a year might be better than the competition. I definitely will not be deleting content on my SMB clients’ sites if an article doesn’t get read in a 30 day period, even if they have over the 50 posts as Helga recommends.
But I’m also hesitant to delete articles that don’t seem to ever get read, and that’s because they are still on topic for the service my clients provide. Surely Google can’t penalize a site for lack of engagement when these SMBs get so little traffic to begin with. And doesn’t their very existence add some topic (business service type) relevancy points, albeit very small, to the site? Or in other words, will Google find a local business more relevant for the service it provides if it also has a lot of articles written about that service? Thoughts?
P.S. I saw your comment about non-U.S. commenters. I, too, noticed all the spam. Sorry to see that. You can’t block them? Hopefully my comment will add some value to the discussion for you.
Hi Kathy,
This doesn’t really apply much to a small business blog with little content. It primarily applies to blogs that have a ton of content of which some is outdated and other posts aren’t really important anymore.
Ahrefs is a huge blog with a ton of content. And because content in their niche changes so much, having only the most recent and applicable advise would really benefit searchers.
Any platform that constantly changes (like Google, Facebook – anything that has new versions or multiple old versions) makes it very difficult to find relevant how-to and other advice.
I once did advertising for a company that wanted a keyword that only got 1 click a month. All advice on AdWords says to delete keywords like that. But that 1 click generated a 4-figure sale. So you have to adapt to the specific client’s needs.
The primary purposes of content on a business blog are to answer customer questions and to provide quality content writers might link to in order to improve search engine positions. In your case, I wouldn’t focus on deleting if there is only a small amount of content.
Regarding comments, the problem is that most readers do not comment. And some commenters who work for companies that pay them to comment actually read and learn from my content. We block all bot-left comments and delete more comments than we permit.
Usually, I delete what I consider spam. But because I am a supporter of small business and I don’t want to be a bigot, my interpretation is looser than what many sites would choose to use. Even people in other countries deserve to interact and ask questions.
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Nice Blog. But it is better to update the old content instead of deleting it. I’m going to present my conclusion right off the bat, and let you decide based on the evidence whether you agree with me or not. I think that there is a time and a place for deleting old blog posts and that it can be a valuable move to make. You can increase your ranking and your traffic in doing so, but only if you do it for the right reasons, and you do it properly. I’ll discuss that as well.
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Hey Helga! A big thumbs up for the great work 🙂
“Applying the Tactic To Your Blog” – this is the point that many people fail to do..
Cheers
I deleted some of my content. and i think it works. but remember to delete the posts you actually sure that does not have any views. and try to edit and add new links to some of your content. google loves editing and internal link building.
My point of view no need of deleting posts…It’s not good to delete old blogs if you want to change some content you have to update…. Google also like this. But Thanks for sharing.
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This is a really interesting case study and I would love to know how this affected Ahref’s organic traffic and keyword rankings. Deleting old content is often frowned upon but I guess for a blog like Ahrefs where content is always flowing, you have to make serious decisions like this. I’m just curious because for sure these articles that you deleted are ranking for keywords since Ahrefs is such an authoritative website, how did you manage this? You redirected your pages but how about the keywords these articles ranked for?
No need of deleting posts…It’s not good to delete old blogs if you want to change some content you have to edit only no need to delete.
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It is really helpful .. but I think Merger Methode is more helpful to grow your traffic without promotion.
but It is a little tricky for newbies..
Thanks for sharing ..
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Timely post! I’ve been giving it a lot of thought on deleting some of my older content but man, the struggle is real! It’s harder to let go because they bring so much memory of back then when you are just starting out and still learning the ropes.
Quick question though, what if instead of deleting those old contents, we bring it back to life by updating it with more word counts, images and keywords? Would it give a more positive effect on the site that way?
Its really very helpful blog from which i know about traffic of website and more.Thanks and keep it up.
This is a nice topic about content and how can content effect our website ranking. Thank you for sharing this type of content
Have you noticed any difference in tragic/rankings/etc since you deleted the content? If so, I’ll definitely have to try this with a few of my sites… I never would have even thought there would be such a thing as having “too much” content.
Hi Mike,
I haven’t done it myself, yet – but I’m planning on doing this. They did get an 89% traffic increase from doing it. It isn’t a matter of “too much” content; it is having weak content that has no incoming links or traffic on your site.
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Hi,
This is nice post for how to decide what blog content to delete and having right traffic increase and thanks a lot for sharing with us.
A good blogger should be guided by targeted audience pains and interests. Thanks a lot for your informative content sharing.
I have never thought before that , deleting content can improve traffic. But, as you explain everything in the article is wonderful. Yes of course, the articles having no views and less content should be removed. It will help to increase the authority of a blog. Thanks for the information, Helga.
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I think instead of deleting old posts you can try to update them with new content. Google loves it.
Its not good to delete old blogs. Either it should be modified better. Nice article by you.
Wow, 300 posts sacrificed, I don’t think any other blogger would even try to attempt it for the sake of audit. But I guess it paid out well and thanks to the big move bloggers like us can act smart and work on our content.
I really thank Helga and the GrowMap team for addressing this issue. I totally agree that since past few updates of Google, it has made it mandatory for the bloggers aiming for a good rank to write content that not only is authentic in its nature but aims to provide value to their audiences. Thanks again for the post.
Hi Helga,
I didn’t think it was necessary to delete old blog posts from your blog before reading this article. This article is very informative.
Thanks for sharing this post and have a good day.
nice post its so usefull information.i know the lotof information from this post.Thanks for sharing how and why to accomplish all this as I may have to delete a few. It’s not an easy option.
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Merger Methode is more helpful to grow your traffic without promotion.
but It is a little tricky for newbies.
This post helps newbies to merge their content.
Thanks!!
A good blogger should be guided by targeted audience pains and interests. This line says it all. Thank you for sharing this. Allow me to share .
For increasing the blog traffic, I think I should implement it in the future. Not now, ’cause I already have low posts publish in my blog.
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Hi Helga, I’ve been working like a dog lately to update old posts. I noticed I had orphaned content and when I go to add the links I update the posts along with it.
It is a lot of work but it will make a huge difference. I updated images too since I don’t like the sizes I used before Yoast SEO premium came along. I had over 550 posts. I have about 300 more to go through but I’m getting there a little at a time.
Thanks for sharing how and why to accomplish all this as I may have to delete a few. It’s not an easy option.
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Hi Lisa,
Yes, I have the same kinds of issues. But my greatest challenge is making time to go visit other CommentLuv blogs and bring American commenters back. I can’t seem to get people to stop putting my site on lists for spammers so I’m getting too much non-U.S. traffic.
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I didn’t think it was necessary to delete old blog posts it this article has given me some insights. Thanks for sharing this