Many of the companies that turn to us for content have already started a website and created a blog that they simply can’t keep up on their own. Often some intern or non-writer fills it with a few basic, boring posts and then forgot about it, updating it once a month or so with some brief blurb that offers little value to the reader. Then they turn to Great Leap Studios to do it better. (Hint: That’s us.)
Generally, we’d fill up your blog with dozens of pages of content, and your old blog posts will be drowned out. Yet nothing is ever deleted from the Internet, and if you’re not proud of your previous posts, they may become something you want to delete in order to ensure no one sees them and notices the difference in the way that blog has been run.
To Delete or Not to Delete?
The question seems like it comes down to two things:
- Quality
- Hits
Poor quality posts are poor quality posts, and presumably you wouldn’t want to keep them even if they’re getting hits. Similarly, if a post isn’t getting hits, it’s not useful, so you can delete it without issue…
Ha! Just kidding. The reality is that neither of those are true, and in many cases there is no reason to delete a previous post.
Poor Quality Posts: Bad posts should be deleted. But that doesn’t mean the page needs to be deleted. If it still gets hits, why not replace it with better writing? Often when we work with clients, we don’t delete their old pages of content – we replace them with writing that’s more effective, and if your content is already getting hits, then the results of those hits should improve greatly over time.
Posts with No Hits: When you fill a website with dozens of pages of content, many of the pages won’t get hits. It’s the nature of search engines. There’s nothing wrong with that. High quality content still gets checked by search engines, and the more of it your website has, the better your website is going to do. Your website’s goal is to get hits, and each individual post helps you reach that goal even without the individual post’s success.
So when do you delete a post? You can consider deleting a post if it gets no hits and is poor quality, since replacing the content will be less valuable than adding new content. Even then replacing may be worthwhile, but only if it doesn’t hurt your budget. If the post is high quality or gets hits, there are other ways you can use the page without deleting your old content.
