Basic Blogger Tips: Why You Should NEVER Delete Redundant Blog Posts

Often regular bloggers find obsolete or redundant posts on their blog, and delete them to tidy the appearance. Today's Blogger tip explains why blog posts should never be fully deleted, and what you should do instead.

We all know what it's like. You publish a blog post when you're tired, upset, angry, drunk - or otherwise unable to judge the relevance or usefulness of the post - or you find an old post that is now completely irrelevant, or - worse still - totally inaccurate.

So, what do you do? You delete it, right?

No... This is a wrong move, and here's why: when you delete a blog post the url (web-page address) remains live, or active, and any search engine results or links posted elsewhere, by yourself or your readers, will pull up an error page.

This doesn't sound too bad, but actually it is. Search engines don't take kindly to error pages, and will rank your blog poorly if there are too many of them. Some search engines will fail to index a blog at all, if there are too many of these error pages.

So, what should you do instead? There are two options; one is to update or edit the post, making it relevant/accurate, or changing it to something entirely different. The other is to remove the content and replace it with a polite message explaining the page is no longer available. You needn't go into why, and a simple sentence or two will do. For example:

 "Unfortunately this page is no longer available. We apologise for any inconvenience."

In addition to the message, you could use also add links to similar posts, or those you believe will be relevant or interesting to any readers who've found their way to the post you've removed, which reduces your chances of losing readers. It also seems more professional than a blank page.

Whichever method you choose, you should remember to edit the labels or keywords, in addition to the blog post itself, as you don't want the search engines to register keyword spamming - that is, use of irrelevant keywords).