How’s that for a blog title? Yes, it’s accurate… but slightly misleading. It was also necessary.

I’ve also lost 70 pounds since 2012!

I have deleted over 500 articles in total; just not all of them on this blog.I’ve deleted about 350 here, and about 150 on my business blog. I’m about to tell you why, because it’s something you might want to think about when it comes to your blog, especially if it’s older.

I started my business blog in 2005; I started this one in December, 2006. Back then, the concept of quality over quantity didn’t exist when it came to driving traffic and blog ranks. The most important thing was having something as often as possible. Because I followed that strategy, at one point this blog was ranked in the top 75,000 websites in the world; my business blog (which enhanced the presence of my business website) was ranked around the 140K range; not bad, right?

As time changed, Google rank qualifications started changing. First they went after how you were advertising to generate revenue. If you remember Google Rank (ugh!), then you know it was important to have at least a rank of 3, which this blog had. One day that got taken away from me because Google didn’t like some of the links I was using; they were making me money, but they didn’t have anything to do with what this blog was about; I didn’t know that was supposed to be a marketing rule, especially since Google and YouTube don’t seem to use that with their talent.

It took 3 years to get my rankings back on this blog; it never affected my business blog, but because I wasn’t writing as much I’d already started losing traffic. I’d lost some traffic here as well, and it’s been hard to get some of it back.

Why? Because the next pertinent thing was having quality content. I’d started writing quality content, but in the first 3 years of this blog I couldn’t honestly say it was all quality. I wrote more than 1,000 articles in the first 3 years; some of those articles were only 3 to 5 paragraphs. Some were on the main topics I wanted to talk about here, but a lot of the others… nah! lol

Thus, I did what I always do; I started doing some research. It wasn’t these two specific links, but these were some of the people I came across recommending creating better content. First there’s Neil Patel (because of course!), who wrote Why Removing Outdated Content Could Save Your Site. Next is Eb Gargano, who wrote Should you delete old blog posts?. Those and a bunch of other articles I came across made great recommendations. Heck, even I’d written an article on the topic of great content on one’s blog.

What I decided to do was go back to the beginning of this blog, look at some of the content and either outright delete it or move it to the private or trash area. Some I outright deleted, knowing I was never going to do anything with them. The rest gives me an opportunity to look at them at a future time, decide if they’re worthy of an update, and makes it easy to create “new” content that’s better than when it was first published. I’ve done the same thing on my business blog, only a lot more of those articles are still pertinent, if not the examples I used for all those articles. Still, by doing what I’ve done so far, it’s helping me to reduce the amount of bad articles from both blogs.

Repurposing content is always a great idea; I wrote about that in 2018. It doesn’t take as long to update content as it does writing something totally new. It’s great for SEO purposes, and if you know how to link back to your own content, even better.

Now… being me… I’ve left a few articles that have nothing to do with the main topic of this blog. For instance, I kept an article talking about diabetes information, since I’m diabetic, and it allows me to link newer content about diabetes back to the original. I kept all my original articles giving blogging tips, shorter than what I started creating later but still pertinent to my main topic. And I don’t apologize for keeping the two articles I wrote about Michael Jackson after he passed away. I’ve also kept articles that took me a long time to put together, my “top 10” and “top 20” lists; once again, because of the effort it took to do them.

Because I have other things to do and deal with, I’ve slowed down the process on both of the blogs for the time being, but I expect I’ll get back to them when I have more free time. It’s still more important to have new content because I allow newer content to still receive comments; that’s how one should run their blog because, truthfully, how often do we go back to look at things we’ve written years ago except to link to them in the newer content?

So, that’s it; that’s the lesson for today regarding blogging, driving traffic, updating old content and removing things that aren’t all that good. Any questions or comments will be appreciated. 🙂