Removing Old Posts: Common Practice?
I was reading an article on North x East recently, written by Leo Babauta, that suggests periodically going through your archives and getting rid of old posts that don’t add a lot of value for your readers. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, yet it surprised me when I read it. Since becoming more aquainted with blogging and what seems to be the overall consensus of the blogosphere, I’ve been under the impression that a post was to be left alone once it was published. Under certain circumstances, I’ve seen bloggers remove posts that generated some very heated debate and/or posts that were confrontational, but that’s a rare exception. I know there aren’t any rules, but thats been my impression.
While optimizing the “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” of your blog, Leo suggests:
Every month or two, you should go back over your archives. This is a daunting task for many bloggers, but it helps tremendously. You might have had a bunch of posts that talked about site updates, or your daily life, that most people don’t find interesting when they go over your archives. They want to find the amazing posts. If a post didn’t do well, perhaps it’s time to toss it. Cut out the noise.
The more I think about this, it really does make a lot of sense. Especially posts that announce site updates, etc. I’m not sure exactly what he means by posts that didn’t do well……..posts that didn’t generate many comments, perhaps? Mmmm, I’m not sure that would be a good way to decide how useful a post is.
What about you? What do you think about deleting older posts that don’t necessarily give the reader any benefit? How do you decide which ones stay and which ones go? I’m genuinely interested…
July 13th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
I prefer to keep all of my posts alive. Out of one post a day, there have only been three posts about the blog. These are posts I may want to occasionally reference occasionally, on and off my blog. Otherwise, I try to have all of my posts be useful in some way. Plus, I hate broken links of any sort.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
So far, I’ve kept all of mine. However, there are some on here that I probably could live without having.
As far as the broken links, do you mean links from search engines?
July 13th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
I always thought a blog was meant to be a running record of thoughts, opinions, events, etc. It would seem a little odd to me to start selectively deleting posts after a time.
The only possible exception might be posts that relate to the blog’s status, such as a “we were off-line last night because our web server crashed”.
I’m also interested to hear other thoughts on this!
July 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
As far as a blog being a running record, I guess that’s the way it’s been. But I guess it can be whatever you want it to be.
I don’t know if you guys read North x East, but Collis had probably 80-100 posts on there, and I thought the majority of them were quite good. When he recently redesigned the site and brought in another writer, he kept only 7-8 of the old posts.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:09 am
I really like this new design, its very good. You did great on the color scheme and the overall layout is great.
As far as deleting old blog posts that don’t offer value, I agree with John. In my opinion my blog is also a running record of all those different aspects of my life. I think instead of deleting posts, you’d be better served creating a portion of your site to promote your most valuable resources and content for your readers. Just my thoughts on the subject.
July 14th, 2007 at 6:04 am
Hey there,
when you got the ‘popularity’ Plug-in installed on your blog, you can track how many people read the post. How many read it as it were on the frontpage and many other things.
That, together with a link/click-tracking system you can determine whether a post was successful or not. But the kind of success depends on the definition of the blog’s owner: cash, readers, comments, link-backs etcetera.
Just my 2c,
Dave Origano
July 14th, 2007 at 9:23 am
I think deleting old post is totally depend on the blog owner. If you like your every single post to keep alive, then who is going to stop you? and vice versa.
For me, I delete certain post that I think should be deleted because of certain circumstances. But this may vary, to one blogger, to another blogger.
The bottom line is we should be deleting if we feel, we should delete certain post. If not, then let it be.
July 14th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Clarke,
Thanks for the compliment. That’s not a bad idea designating a place for the most useful stuff………kinda like Chris Pearson does in his sidebar.
Dave,
I had forgot all about that popularity plugin. That could be a great tool when your blogging for business. Welcome, and thanks for the reply.
Aryst,
I think your right. No one can really tell you that you should delete older posts, and whether you should depends on the purpose of the blog.
I’m thinking their are two main ways to look at this.
When you take the personal element out of a post, holding on to it doesn’t seem near as important.
July 14th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
[...] Should you delete older posts that don’t add a lot of value, and could be considered “useless” by some of your readers? Is deleting older posts common practice? [...]
July 14th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
I’d like to second ClarkW’s opinion..I’d rather see pointers to the best stuff as opposed to cleansing a site of the less popular material.
I’m a chronic blog surfer, and one of my pet peeves is when I reading back through old posts and they reference other posts that are no longer there or have been removed. I like watching the evolution of the site…flipping through the old posts, including all the little updates, gives a good picture of how the Blog’s life has progressed. Even the old “our site was down last week” posts give a glimpse into that.
July 14th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Zen Zoomie, Dave, and Aryst,
I want to welcome all you folks to my site, and thank you for adding to the discussion.
Zen Zoomie,
What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting to see how a blog has progressed over time……….especially when you can see the traffic growth along with more focused posts.
July 15th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Jon’s play about doing some rewriting of older posts is something I’ve been thinking about doing. I think a blah post with a good rewrite and some SEO could be more beneficial as far as bringing in search traffic and giving your readers a higher number of quality posts.
In a way this kind of flies in the face of how the old media rules operate … but then, this isn’t the old media.
July 15th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
I completely agree. Especially a post whose purpose is to provide great info…….why not spruce it up if it needs it? That’s probably a much better bet than trashing it.
July 16th, 2007 at 7:07 am
[...] Blog More Powerful By Optimizing The Signal-To-Noise Ratio – an article commented on by Anthony at Antbag and Jon at Smart Wealthy Rich. Of particular interest is the suggestion of culling your archives. [...]
January 6th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
What I have been doing with posts that are no longer of current interest on my PenderBlog is to revise the date stamps to a month and year before the first post. I then reassign them the category “Archive” and add the header “First posted on “. This is a bit clumsy, but is a way of preserving past posts while getting ones no longer relevant out of the procession of posts.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:37 am
Changing the time post date.. might have a problem and give you some URL error when google checks your site.
Just be sure that nobody is attached with your post before removing it.
In my personal view it is not a problem to retain your old post. Thus your reader can know you more.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I was just thinking about this topic the other day. I took a year break and just recently started writing on my personal blog again. It was interesting to read how you evolve as a blogger so I kind of liked having the old posts on there. However, at the same time I realize I was a really bad blogger back in 06 (at least I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two since it’s now my job) so I was thinking maybe I needed to clean house a bit. I came to the conclusion that I should keep the old entries because they have already been picked up by search engines. Now I’m thinking I’ll try the clean up theory Shane suggested.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
how can i remove an old post from a web site that i did not post , that contains information about me that i don’t want public, if the person who posted it has died?
November 1st, 2008 at 10:50 am
If the website owner has passed away, I would think that their hosting account will be cancelled……which would solve the problem. If the site is on a free hosting service, such as Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc…….you may be able to get it taken care of by contacting them. That’s a couple of ideas, but I really don’t know.