Firstly, if you’ve seen the advice that SEO is dead, blogs are dead, you don’t need blogs if you’re optimising for AI search, etc, please read on. Some AI-search ‘experts’ are saying you should delete them all, and it’s just not true. But neither is the idea that you should only delete blogs in the most extreme circumstances, and ideally not at all. So, when should you delete a blog?
There’s a lot of nuance around when and why to delete blogs. How you deal with your deleted blogs is also nuanced. It will depend on your reasons for getting rid of them and the outcome you’re looking for.
When I’m working on SEO, copy, and content with my clients, we’ll look at their catalogue of blogs. Some will be indexed, some won’t. Some will drive traffic they want, some will drive traffic that’s completely wrong for what they want to achieve. We’ll evaluate and make a plan for dealing with blogs to support and complement their desired outcomes. You should be taking this approach to yours too with a regular content audit.
Blogs you should consider deleting
- Blogs that are considered ‘thin’ content
- Blogs that are out of date or irrelevant
- Blogs relating to what you did before your business changed
- Blogs that are not indexed and have no backlinks
- Blogs essentially covering the same thing (cannibalisation)
- Blogs that have nothing to do with your business or brand
Blogs that are considered ‘thin’ content
If you’ve got blogs that are only a few hundred words long and say very little of interest or substance, they are probably not doing you any favours. If they’re not indexed or have no traffic, they are probably candidates for deletion. Especially if you think about it carefully and would be embarrassed if a potential client were to gain their first impression from them.
Client example: several very short ‘overview’ blogs offering basic information that AI overviews would cover much better.
Solution: some we rewrote to cover the subject properly so they were useful informational blogs showing expertise. These are often great for answering frequently-asked questions and you can send a link to clients when relevant: not everything exists for SEO. Others we decided had no added value so they were deleted and redirected to the most relevant page.
Blogs that are out of date or irrelevant
Things change. Maybe you have blogs that were time-specific and no one cares anymore. Maybe the world has changed and you have posts that are just not relevant these days. Perhaps you’re referencing facts, figures, or studies that have been superseded and they’re therefore currently inaccurate. These are not providing information that anyone needs and could actually be potentially harmful.
Client example: blogs covering information relating to things like government tax changes that have since changed again.
Solution: one blog referenced something that changes at the same time every year. It’s worth updating the original blog each year to reflect these changes rather than deleting the old one and starting again. Others were out of date and either irrelevant or had already effectively been replaced by new, up-to-date blogs. These we deleted and redirected to the most relevant page.
Blogs relating to what you did before your business changed
Pivoting and niching businesses often have this issue. Your older blogs probably cover subjects you’re no longer involved with, or you have fundamentally shifted something within your business. You want to make sure your business is properly represented online and that old content doesn’t confuse people or the search engines.
Client example: one business had effectively closed a department and blogs on that subject were out of place.
Solution: some we could rewrite from a slightly different angle as they contained elements that were still related to the remaining business. Others weren’t and needed deleting. Those we redirected to the most relevant pages.
Blogs that are not indexed and have no backlinks
Blogs that aren’t indexed and have no backlinks have often been judged by the internet as having little value – so you’d need to look at them critically to see whether you think this is an oversight or a fair judgment. If you think they deserve to be indexed, resubmit them and see what happens: they might get indexed straight away. Alternatively they may only need a few minor changes before the search engines will pick them up.
Client example: one client had various unindexed blogs and most were thin content or out of date (this is quite common, see above). Another had some blogs that weren’t indexed that covered multiple topics (half of them nothing to do with her business), but some had elements that were interesting and highly relevant to what she did.
Solution: we rewrote some concentrating purely on those single topics and created interesting, topical, unique blogs that then became worth indexing. One or two had no real value so we deleted them and redirected them to the most relevant page. The ones with URLs that didn’t reflect the new subject we deleted and redirected, and then published new blogs with new, relevant URLs.
Blogs essentially covering the same thing (cannibalisation)
Your blogs should cover multiple aspects of the same subject, but what you don’t want is various blogs that are so similar they are competing to rank for the same keywords. Then you’re effectively competing against yourself and spoiling your chances of ranking well. This is very common – and just because they are competing doesn’t mean you should delete them.
Client example: a couple of clients had blogs that were competing against each other because they were essentially using the same keywords and phrases. Another client had various blogs essentially saying the same thing.
Solution: I rewrote some for the first client so each was focusing on different keywords and phrases. For the second client, I wrote one to cover everything and deleted the others, redirecting those to the rewritten one.
Blogs that have nothing to do with your business or brand
Blogs have evolved over the years and business blogs and personal blogs are now two very different things. While you want personality and unique perspectives in your business-website blogs, they are not diary entries or opportunities for exploring personal interests of no relevance to your actual business. You are probably better saving these subjects for social media.
Client example: one client had various personal blogs about their interest in cooking, which had nothing to do with their business. They were getting traffic and confusing the search engines – making it harder for them to send the right traffic to the website.
Solution: we deleted them but didn’t redirect them even though they returned a 404 error message. If we had redirected them it would have reinforced the idea that the subject matter was relevant – and given people a result they weren’t looking for. Both of these are bad for your SEO. Over time the search engines will stop caring about them so they will eventually no longer ‘exist’ and the error message will disappear.
Once you’ve deleted your blogs
You’ll have already decided how to deal with your blogs: whether or not you’ll redirect them, and where you’ll redirect them to. (Mostly you’ll be redirecting them.)
- Don’t forget to remove internal links or change internal links to the page you’re redirecting them to, not to the URL you’ve redirected.
- Remove or change any links to your blogs on social media.
- Redo your sitemap
You can run a technical SEO audit before and after to check you’ve not missed anything.
Need help with your SEO?
Search engine optimisation (and AI search and generative engine optimisation, or GEO) isn’t just about creating content with keywords and writing blogs. It’s about having the technical fundamentals in place along with the right content. If you need help with your website copy, blogs or are just looking to improve your SEO generally and be more visible online, please get in touch.
