This blog is a collaborative effort by the entire DJA team, from interns to the managing director. But as with any company, sometimes team members move on to new opportunities. One question the DJA team often discusses in staff meetings is when, if ever, is it appropriate to remove old blog posts?
Pamela Seiple at HubSpot thinks it’s a bad idea to delete blog posts and provides an excellent list of reasons:
- You’ll lose all that coveted SEO juice you built.
- You’ll sacrifice a whole lot of inbound link love.
- You’ll miss out on valuable lead generation opportunities.
- You’ll be retroactively wasting a lot of time (and burning a library of resources!).
- You’ll limit social media mentions and content sharing.
While Pamela makes some great points, I don’t think this applies to every blog post. What about blog posts that had very few views? Or what about blog posts that include SEO terms that are no longer relevant? Although I agree with much of what Pamela said, I think there are definitely some exceptions to the rules.
Steve Rubel, a VP of digital strategy at Edelman, went to the extreme and deleted all of his old posts when he moved his blog to Tumblr. His reason – he believes Google “is increasingly focusing more on social cues and information as part of search” and he didn’t want to have multiple sources of content if he left the old blog up.
Whether or not deleting outdated blog content is appropriate still seems to be up for debate on the web – what do you think? Let us know in the comments below.