Blogging – Why You Should Never Delete Content
Although I have placed this under the blogging category it holds true for all websites. However, I think bloggers are far more guilty of this SEO sin than most webmasters, possibly because it is so much easier to create and delete content on a blog. Deleting content is one sure way of killing your reputation – particularly in the search engines.
And yes, reputation is an important ranking factor for most search engines. So how does it harm your reputation? In a number of ways. Let’s look at what happens the moment you publish a post.
For most blogging platforms, especially WordPress, there are a number of things that happen when you click on Publish. There is an option within WordPress that automatically pings your post. If you have linked to another WordPress post, it will get pinged. There are a number of ping services that are also notified. This effectively publishes your post to the web. The link to that post is now out in cyberspace.
Search engines pick up on one of those pings and pay a visit to crawl and index your content. The link to that post is now also indexed within the search engine. If you are keeping up with blog trends then you are probably also sending a Tweet through Twitter.
I am sure you can see where I am going here. The link to that post is now well and truly distributed online. If you delete that post – what happens when someone clicks on one of those links? They arrive on your site and receive a 404 page not found error. If you are smart you will have set up a special 404 page – still, it doesn’t look good.
The same can be said for the search engines. They come crawling again and this time they cannot find your page. That flags a missing page (you can see these crawl errors through Webmaster tools). If you start to build up a lot of these pages then the search engines may downgrade your reputation factor – this, of course, can impact on your search result listings and your search traffic.
Rather than deleting pages, edit them with links to a new page, or put in place proper redirects using your .htaccess file. That protects your reputation whilst achieving the same result.
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