We were badly advised on how to write our early blogs. These were aimed at Google rather than our readers (big mistake). Very spammy repetitive use of keywords and torture to read. We are gradually going back through the seventy or so blogs to improve them but some are so bad that it would be better to delete them. Will we be penalized for deleting these old blogs or should we spend the time to edit and improve them?
Hi! You shouldn’t delete them. You should go through and make them readable and relevant, as you continue to add reader focused content. Good Luck!
If you delete them, there will still be links to them in the Google database that will return errors when clicked. The best thing to do is set up a redirect, whereby any links to those deleted posts are redirected somewhere else—such as to your blog home page. Then there will be no problem.
You can set up these redirects via a .htaccess file. Do you know how to do that? If not, we can help you do it.
Thanks, I would appreciate your help. for example one of our early post by our web designer just said ‘Starting work to improve the waterbed website.’ so I would rather redirect this and a few others. Please try to make any advice understandable for a novice. Thanks Ellie.
OK, will do! First question, then:
What access do you have to your web hosting account? Do you have a web control panel, or can you upload files via FTP? (If that doesn’t mean anything, don’t worry.) If not, how do you make changes on your site?
I have left all the access to a guy that will be improving our website. He will set it up so that we can make relatively simple updates, but I deal with the blog which is wordpress which I can access.
OK, in that case I suggest you ask that guy who is helping to set up some redirects in your .htaccess file for you. You would just need to give him the addresses of the pages that will be disappearing, and give him the address of the page that you want people to be redirected to. (By ‘address’ I mean the full URL, such as [noparse]http://www.mysite.com/post/title-of-post[/noparse].)
Thanks for that, I’ll get him to give me a lesson on that so I can do it myself from now on.
OK. Well, in the .htaccess file you just need to do something like this:
Redirect 301 [COLOR="#FF0000"]/blog/article/this-is-the-post[/COLOR] [COLOR="#0000FF"]/blog/whatever-page-you-like[/COLOR]
You do a line like that for every redirect. So the red bit is the path to the original article, and the blue bit is the path to the page you are redirecting to. The path is really the bit after your domain name (such as mysite.com/blog/article/this-is-the-post).
Once you’ve set up the redirect, you can test it by trying to go to the old page, and the browser should be redirected to the new page.
By the way, this assumes that your site is hosted on the Apache server, whch most are.
According to latest panda updte, a single bad page (low quality content) can affect your whole website.
Hence, I would suggest you to delete the content instead of deleting the page…
- Re-write all the existing content to a quality new content
- Keep all your webpages as it is (because its already indexed by Google).
- Once the new content are ready, replace it with new content in the same page
- Update the time stamp on the blog…
- Do a pinging to all the main sites and wait…
Hurray… your problem solved without deleting your existing pages 
Do not delete it, instead edit it so the backlinks and the traffic will not gone (if ever there are).
you have not to delete them because it will not help
it will just be a disaster
edit those pages, remove extra keywords and than write them in new language that is cool and interesting to read
deletion will not penalize you but why to delete your own hardwork
We did it and it worked - even wrote an idiots guide for when I forget.
Question. Having redirected a blog that google would frown upon to our blog home page for example, should we then delete it? If not it will still be read by google so have we achieved anything? If we delete it will google see a broken link or anything bad or just end up at the blog home page?
If you have set up a redirect so that anyone going to /page1.htm is redirected to /page2.htm then it makes no difference whether you’ve got anything there called /page1.htm, because no-one – no person and no search engine – will ever see it. A 301 redirect isn’t something optional, it isn’t like a road sign that suggests you might want to go down this road to get there, it just happens. No-one will know if there actually is a /page1.htm there or what it says. The only person who can ever see /page1.htm is anyone who logs into the control panel or FTP server.
As Stevie said, no one will ever see it, so I would delete it. That’s really the whole point of the redirect. If you deleted the page and didn’t set up a redirect, that’s where Google might not be so pleased, as the link would get an error message.
Thanks guys, I now have my work cut out redirecting, deleting and writing. Very helpful
I learned a lot in this thread. Many thanks to ralph.m and Stevie D for the tips on the redirects.
Like they’ve said, there’s nothing wrong if you’re going to delete them as long as their old URLs redirect to a new and existing one. There’s something about the old content that you can still do, by the way. You can use parts of that content as examples of what NOT to do when you’re writing something that you would want to get noticed on the Internet. This is a bit off-topic, but at least you have some ideas on what you can post in the future. Plus, it’s a good thing to go down memory lane once in a while to get new ideas.