Having a well resourced website is not a bad thing; in fact, an archive of blog posts shows your experience in your field, and further Google will not penalise you for older blog posts. 
 
You may have noticed that a date will appear on the left hand side of blog posts in Google, and on social media platforms each posts has the date it was shared.  Someone that is searching the internet for a specific topic will generally take note of this date, register it as old content and that it may not be relevant to their needs.
 
This poses the question, should I delete old blog posts or keep them?  While the answer can be a little murky, I would recommend keeping them, they are not doing any harm sitting there, and in fact, can have some benefits. 
 
Below I share some thoughts on why you should keep your old blog posts.
 
Content is king for SEO
Every article or blog post you write is adding to your business’s digital footprint and helping your business rank in Google. It is showing off your expertise, building your credibility, and if you were to delete this content, then that is a lot of hard work wasted.
 
Keeping up with latest trends - make use of older content
Show you are on the ball by having links from your older blog posts to newer content on the same subject.  Set aside time to review old posts and update them or repurpose with any new information or add links to more up-to-date posts on the same subject.

Opportunity to improve your site - no indexing old blog posts
If you are coming up with multiple issues in your Webmaster Tools due to incomplete meta descriptions and titles in older blog posts, you can ‘no index’ these. This will hide them from Google so they are not crawled or seen in search results.  Or, if you have time, go through old blog posts and add in any missing data to the backend to help with your SEO.
 
Site architecture and internal linking
You may have a large site with a lot of content and internal links between pages and content. By deleting blog posts you are running the risk of link breakages, and there is nothing worse than coming across a 404 page when something is broken. This can cause the reader to question the validity of your whole site.
 
Inbound links – referral traffic
If another business or individual links to content on your site that is subsequently deleted, it will create a broken link.  Inbound links are important as they assist with SEO - the more you have, the more authority Google deems you to have. If someone links to an article in your blog and it is no longer there, then that link becomes useless and can affect your referral traffic.
 
On a final note, are things ever truly deleted from the internet anyway? 
When you create content online, be it for social media, an email, a blog post, it is all sitting in someone else’s assets.  And even if you delete it, it can still exist.  Each social media platform, Gmail, and even your local internet provider, stores your data on servers, and each will have their own terms and conditions as to how the data is deleted so if you are determined to delete, it may pay to check these out
 
If you have any questions on how deleting old blog posts may affect your website, get in touch today.

By Kathleen Boyd

​Pre world wide web, it was a sales maxim that you should make contact with, be in front of your sales potentials every 90 days - three months (or less).  Is this still relevant in today’s world of digital marketing and social media?
Certainly it is now possible to blog, post, email inexpensively and relatively quickly, and digital analytics can tell you with what impact your message is being received. Our expectations around communications have changed immensely over the last two decades; we no longer wait for the post to bring us into contact with others; we expect responses to be almost immediate.
Frequency
So while it’s easier to make and keep contact, how often should we be in front of ‘our people’ ?
If your business is B2C, then quite probably the answer is far more often than every 90 days. In fact, for some (younger) markets you may need to be employing a daily presence in social media feeds.
For B2B businesses, the timing can be anything up to 90 days depending on your industry, what resources you can put to the comms, and whether there is any seasonality impacting purchase decisions. (Seasons are three months!)
Quality over quantity
We would suggest of more importance though, is the value of what you have to say. To keep in touch just for the sake of being in touch can have a negative response. If your contacts (be they existing clients, prospective clients, influencers) feel bombarded, and/or question the value of the information you are sending them, they will likely hit the delete button or unsubscribe to be lost potentially forever! Or in the case of printed communications, file them in the bin unread.
So quality over quantity but regularly.
Make it easy for yourself
Make it an objective to take note of industry comment, success stories, learnings that are relevant to your contacts. Ask your team to do likewise – set up a Google docs or similar where ideas can be pooled, have it as an agenda item for your staff meetings. This way when it’s time to write your newsletter - digital or printed - or social media posts, you aren’t on the back foot and it won’t take you another 90 days to get something out there.

​If you’d like to learn more, get in touch. We’ve got more ideas on how you can keep your business in front.