Should a business remove outdated content marketing?
Author: Ryan Walsh
Date of publication: 11th/November/2023
Should a business delete blog posts which have out of date information?
This is a very difficult question to answer, because it will often will need a SEO consultant to cast their eyes over each page. A review of each page, or blog post will be needed, then a decision needs to be made to update the existing work, to remove it or simply to keep the URL and to completely rewrite the page in its entirety.
Low quality pages
In some instances, when a page is really low quality, for example a business may have hired the wrong digital marketing company, that may have simply copied other companies work (not recommend). In this situation, it’s a no-brainer that the work page should be deleted, and the page completely deleted.
However, in other circumstances, when it’s just a matter of the written work, is out of date, often it’s best to check with a marketing company whether it’s best to update the blog post, with more current advice, edit or completely delete it.
URL
Sometimes, a URL might have been live for say 10 years, and therefore be regularly indexed and crawled by Googlebot. Therefore, even though the page now contains out of date information, it could simply be updated, and the URL may still have SEO benefit.
YMYL Pages
So, for example, a business which offers advice, such as legal advice for example, will often need to revisit those pages and keep them up-to-date.
Any pages which were impacted by the YMYL Google update, should be regularly updated, its important that any blog posts / pages, are regularly looked over, to see if more up to date advice could be provided.
Here at Walsh, we have been working with a number of businesses, to regularly write content marketing for those businesses every single month. Sometimes, we also need to revisit old work to keep it up-to-date.
Regularly creating content marketing, is a key part of improving a business’s SEO.
Why would a business have to delete some of their blog posts?
It’s especially important, to keep your money or your life (YMYL) websites up-to-date, for example businesses which operate in the legal or financial business sectors need to keep their information up-to-date.
It’s also important whatever business sector, your businesses it, that you keep the advice and information as up to date as possible. As otherwise a shopper could read the blog posts, and think that work is no longer relevant, its outdated, therefore, that could mean your website incurs a very high bounce rate.
Pages with a high bounce rate
If there are any pages on your website with a high bounce rate, its important to see why, perhaps the information is out of date, and just needs updating?
Duplicated content marketing
A business may have simply copy and pasted content marketing from another business on to their own business’s website (not recommended) and duplicated work, this most definitely should be deleted.
It will offer no value and could actually damage your businesses organic SEO.
Spun content marketing (avoid this it will damage your companies SEO)
You don’t see many businesses using spun content these days, because it’s a very outdated method of SEO and will undoubtedly, 100% lead to the business incurring an algorithmic penalty.
So, it’s most definitely not worth using this method at all.
However, it’s important to know how spun content marketing works, basically, its an article is put into a program, and then spun.
This basically means that the program creates let’s say 1000 blog posts, out of just one blog post, but what is written at the end, is absolute rubbish, it’s low-quality work that will actually damage your businesses SEO.
Content marketing that’s Content Thin
So many businesses, once published blog posts, that would be say 400 hundred words, that didn’t really answer the question that is asked in the title. Instead, the marketing agency just tried to write words a lot of text, to try and improve the SEO by mentioning the same keywords, over, over again. This method doesn’t work. For example, a company that sells bikes, might have repeatedly might have repeatedly mentioned the word mountain bikes.
This type of content marketing that is content thin marketing, is absolute rubbish, it’s going to damage your businesses.
So, whether it’s content thin, content marketing whether it’s duplicated marketing or whether it spun content marketing, it all most definitely needs to be avoided as could damage your businesses SEO.
Before you go and delete a huge amount to pages and blog posts, you do have to pause for a second, and have a good think about the following.
• Is this work still helpful to shoppers?
• Is the work high quality?
• Can the written work just be updated?
Because there is absolutely no point, in just deleting good quality content marketing, just because it’s has some out of date information on the page.
In matter-of-fact this can massively impact your businesses search engine optimisation.
For example, even though the blog post might have information which is out of date, that URL might still have a lot of value, in terms of the seo, it might even have a lot of quality do follow backlinks pointing to it.
Severing those links, and what we mean by that is, simply deleting that pages which have good quality links pointing to the page, well this will negatively impact your businesses search engine optimisation.
Before you go deleting any pages or blog posts, we do recommend have a meeting with a reputable, respected and well-known seo agency such as ours.
Therefore, before deleting any blog post or pages, this must be carefully thought out because if good quality pages are deleted then this could adversely impact your businesses seo.
Audit
A highly skilled, knowledgeable an expert seo consultant should carefully review each page and blog post to see whether it needs keeping the same, updating or possibly deleting.
The digital marketing agency should come up with recommendations, whether to rewrite the page, update some of the information that has already been written or perhaps it is a very low-quality page it will need to be deleted.
Some business can see a dramatic uplift in their organic traffic by just improving existing blog posts
More is always better, right?
Well not really, because when it comes to improving a company’s organic seo, the general rule is the quality always triumphant quantity.
So, before you start adding a massive amount of blog posts, do pause for a second, take a breather, make a cup of tea and have a think about whether you could actually improve your existing content marketing?
For example, you might have written blog post such as, “How to write content marketing in 2021” well why not update that the current year? And add some new advice to say the top or bottom of the page?
For example, you might just wish to add a section of the bottom say “update, for 2023” then you can start to add different recommendations and guidance for the current year.
In conclusion
What we would recommend is that the business doesn’t just start deleting blog posts and pages to try and improve the companies seo, without first checking with a seo consultant / marketing agency.
Website redesign
Neither should a company have their company website, completely redesigned overnight and change all of the content marketing- that’s the written text, as this could adversely affect the businesses seo, if its not redesigned correctly, with the help of a seo company.
And you might be thinking yes but that will cost a lot of money, right?
Well, the alternative it is if the business was to delete good quality blog posts, that have some seo value, and they might see businesses organic seo plummet, from say page 1 to perhaps to even page 10.
This is why deleting blog posts, updating the content marketing, or if your thinking about having your company website redesigned, the process should all be handled correctly by a highly experienced marketing company such as ours.
