When you start a blog, you’re super enthusiastic and just want to post about everything, but as you have your blog a few years, then you may look back at your old posts (Timehop is awful for reminding you about old posts!) and cringe a bit. You might be tempted to just delete them all, but should you?
Keeping old posts is a good idea because it means any links to those posts won’t be broken. It’s also quite nice to look back at the old posts and realise how much you have improved. Old posts can still bring in traffic because of the search rankings – it might be worth rewriting the post (and including a few affiliate links if you use them – you may be able to earn a few pennies from those random searchers) or just updating the pictures if that’s the bit you’re not happy with.
It may be worth writing an updated version of the post as well as adding in to the original – perhaps it’s a post about favourite stationery – since new things are always coming out, this sort of post is easy to update.
If you do decide to delete the old posts, make sure you have redirects in place (also known as 301 redirects) – for WordPress users, this is pretty easy as you can use plugins to do the work for you. You should also consider whether deleting the older posts is going to affect you elsewhere – if you delete all posts after a certain point, will you want to download them so you can look back at them? A blog is as much of a record of your life as anything else, and in the future, you way want those posts to look back at your life at a certain point.
What do you think – would you delete old posts?
