Fact: Old content sometimes becomes outdated. Blogs, videos, news stories and downloadable booklets simply do not last forever.
Sometimes you will be able to make the content usable again with an update, other times you will have no choice but to move it to the trash.
However, when cleaning up your old content, there are certain things you need to keep in mind.
Update old content that is still useful
Let’s start with an example: on our blog, we have an article called What Google Is Looking At: Ranking High in 2020 [FREE EBOOK] . That’s an article that needs Our phone number databasa>se are 100% Accurate and our data collecting way is human. our phone number databases are active and asia mobile number list looks like valid also updated 2024 you will be sold with all in one Databaes. If you run campaign with our same database, of course your business can grow up. So actually our databases are from the sites that allow for database quality or quantity permissioned. to be updated constantly to keep it relevant. We need to make sure that it stays up to date with all the changes that Google keeps making to its ranking algorithm. We’ll also need to change the title of the blog every once in a while. 2020 is a thing of the past!
That blog post helps entrepreneurs and marketers to sharpen their SEO
Even though the content of the knowledge book changes over time. Therefore, it is basically useful content and worth updating.
You can easily create new, valuable content from your old posts by updating them and making them current again – old wine in new bottles, as the saying goes. For example, you can merge three old blog posts on the same topic into one new post or simply replace older parts of your post with updated content.
Creating a clone of your post so you have a draft to work on makes this process a lot easier. Not every CMS has this feature, though. So be sure to ask your website builder for help if you want a clone feature added to your posts.
Remove irrelevant posts or pages
You probably have old posts or pages on your site that you no longer need. Think of a blog post about a product that you haven’t sold in a long time and don’t plan on selling again, an announcement about an event that took place a long time ago, or old pages with little or no content – the so-called thin content pages.
These are just a few examples, but I’m sure you know which posts and pages I’m talking about. This old content doesn’t add any value, now or in the near future. In that case, you need to tell Google to stop indexing these old posts or pages, or you need to repurpose the URL .
When I say delete old content, I don’t mean just hit delete and forget about it. If you do that, the content could show up in Google for weeks after it’s deleted. The URL might also have link value, which would be a shame to waste.
So, what should you do? Here are two possibilities:
If a URL still has value because you have a number of quality links pointing to that page, for example, you want to leverage that value by redirecting the URL you want to remove to a related URL. With a 301 redirect, you let search engines and visitors know that there is a better or newer version of this content elsewhere on your site. The 301 redirect automatically sends people and Google to this better or newer page.
Let’s say you have an old post about a specific dog breed.
You need to delete it, so the logical next step would be to redirect that post to a newer post about that dog breed. If you don’t have that post, choose a post about the closest breed. Redirecting to a relevant category page may be an option in some cases, but don’t make a habit of it. Also, redirecting to the homepage should be out of the question – this is an SEO anti-pattern .
Creating a 301 redirect (for example in WordPress ) is not difficult. It would go too far to write an instruction about it here, but I promise that I or a colleague will write about it soon in a separate article.
Photo source: Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Option 2: Tell search engines that the content was intentionally removed
If there is no relevant page on your site that you can redirect malaysia phone number resource to, it is a good idea to tell Google to forget about your old post entirely. You do this by giving the page a “410 Deleted” status in Google. This status code tells Google and visitors that the content didn’t just disappear; you deleted it for a reason.
If Google can’t find a post, the server will usually return a “404 Not Found” status to the search engine bot. You’ll also find a 404 crawl error for that page in your Google Search Console . Eventually, Google will figure it out and the URL will gradually disappear from search results pages, but this takes time.
Redirect the old post to a related post
The 410 is more powerful in that it tells Google that the page is aleart news gone forever, never to return. You deleted it on purpose, period. Google will respond faster to that than with a 404. Sound complicated? On the Yoast website, you can find an extensive article about HTTP status codes .
Do you have old content to clean up?
Cleaning up old content should be part of your maintenance routine to keep your website relevant. If you don’t check your old posts regularly, you’ll sooner or later run into problems. You might be showing incorrect information to your visitors. It can also hurt your Google ranking because you have too many pages on the same topic, which causes keyword cannibalization . So, go through your old posts and decide what to do: update, merge, or delete.
