Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?

[netviper]

So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out.  One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.  None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues.  Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better.

So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts.

What do you guys think?

[TakeshiYoung]

You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that:

http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

[BradyDCallahan]

It depends on what you mean by "remove."

If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?

Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.

When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.

Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).

This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.

To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."

Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.

[EGOL]

we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.

Wow.... it is great to hear someone looking at their content and deciding that he can kick it up a notch.  I have seen a lot of people would never, ever, pull the kill switch on an old blog post.  In fact they are still out there hiring people to write stuff that is really crappy.

If this was my site I would first check to be sure that I don't have a penguin or unnatural links problem.  If you think you are OK there, here is what I would do.

1. I would look at those blog posts to see if any of them have any traffic, link or revenue value.  Value is defined as... A) Traffic from any search engine or other quality source,  B) valuable links,  C) viewing by current website visitors,  D) traffic who enter through those pages making any income through ads or purchases.

2. If any of them pass the value test above then I would improve that page.  I would put a nice amount of work into that page.

3. Next I would look at each of those blog posts and see if any have content value.  That means an idea that could be developed into valuable content... or valuable content that could be simply rewritten to a higher standard.  Valuable content is defined as a topic that might pull traffic from search or be consumed by current site visitors.

4. If any pass the valuable content test then I would improve them.  I would make them kickass.

5. After you have done the above, I would pull the plug on everything else.... or if I was feeling charitable I would offer them to a competitor. 

Salutes to you for having the courage to clean some slates.

[Travis_Bailey]

I would run them through Copyscape to check for plagiarism/duplicate content issues. After that, I would check for referral traffic. If there are some pages that draw enough traffic, you might not want to remove them. Finally, round it off with a page level link audit. Majestic can give you a pretty good idea of where they stand.

The pages that don't make the cut should be set to throw 410 status codes. If you still don't like the content on pages with good links and/or referral traffic, 301 those to better content on the same subject.