In this article, we intend to provide a comprehensive answer to the following three questions
- What to do with the old articles on the site that have a good position but the content is not useful?
- Does removing these articles cause the site to lose its reputation and position?
- What problems do these old articles cause?
It was in the early 2000s that big businesses realized the value of providing specialized articles and producing content (text, audio, and video), and digital marketing is a powerful arm to increase sales, increase the rate of interaction and increase awareness of the Brand used.
In the meantime, some small businesses also took advantage of this opportunity and used blogs to attract advertisements and thus earn income, which also had success in this field.
Of course, an important point that was not given importance in those years was audience friendliness and improving the quality of articles in terms of visuals and content.
Businesses often copied articles from each other and uploaded them without checking the quality or updating the article on their pages or the blog networks they had built.
It was around 2011 that Google introduced the Panda algorithm to combat this system due to users’ dissatisfaction with the search results and poor quality content that was spread on the web.
One of Panda’s biggest struggles is the destruction of so-called content farm websites, the managers of these sites often published worthless or low-value articles, which were completely degraded by Google’s move.
Old articles are like old and valuable books that should be taken out of the library every once in a while, flipped through, and dusted.
But if our library has books with ineffective or irrelevant content, is it better to put them in a box and take them out of the library or keep them?
Now we extend this example to the internet space and blog articles, if we look at this issue from a technical point of view, definitely removing old and worthless articles can improve the performance of Google crawlers on your website.
The time that crawling robots spend on your website reviewing the articles produced is limited, and this time should not be spent reviewing old and worthless articles on your website.
But on the other hand, your content is the symbol of your brand, and improving it can increase your credibility and value among users.
So, instead of deleting the articles, it is better to edit and update them as much as possible.
Table of Contents
What are the criteria for deleting or updating articles?
For this purpose, first, try to extract complete and comprehensive information and statistics about old articles through tools such as Search Console or Google Analytics.
This information should be completely quantitative and related to visits, comments, interaction rates, etc.
After collecting this information, you should review and compare the articles so that you can decide to delete or update them. For this, I will introduce you to five important criteria to do this difficult task easily.
First criterion: To what extent is my content useful and practical for the user?
Useful content (text, audio, and video) is essentially content that increases the user’s awareness or entertains him.
Useful content should create a question in the audience’s mind or answer a question for the user, solve the user’s problem, or be attractive to him.
Criterion 2: How valuable is my content?
Content that has a high number of views and encourages the audience to share or comment is valuable.
It should be noted that the most valuable content is the content that leads the user to the purchase page through a clever CTA button.
Third criterion: Does my content have a technical problem?
In all blogs, even our blog, some articles are at a high level in terms of content quality, but for technical reasons, such as writing tips, having attractive and relevant photos, good internal linking, etc., are weak. These contents, which are often included in articles, are the answer to this question.
Criterion 4: Is my content relevant to my work topic?
Your content should be related to the topic of your website and your field of work, otherwise, there is no reason to keep these articles. Even content that has added value, if it is not related to your field of work, it is better to remove it from the site and replace it with relevant and quality content.
Fifth criterion: Is the topic or text of my content repetitive?
While evaluating and reviewing articles, we may come across items that are similar to each other in terms of subject matter, and in rare cases, they seem to be complete copies.
These articles may cause problems such as copied content or cannibalization on your site.