Definitely leave them up. Or you’ll lose any of the benefit of using an old link and it’ll basically be like you are starting with a brand new post. I recommend you delete everything that’s not salvageable first. Then order your poor quality posts from worst to best and tackle the worst first. That way, the time with the really bad posts will be short. I would also make your poor quality posts hard to find from your reader’s perspective, so at least a regular reader won’t see them unless they stumble across them in a search. That way, your website will appear high quality to your readers. Hope that helps! Eb 🙂

Good question! It depends on a few factors. First, how important / relevant is that search term to your website? So, for example, with your website… Let’s say ‘Where to keep ducks?’ or ‘What to feed ducks?’ had super high competition, well, you’d still want those posts on your site because a site about ducks that didn’t cover those topics would be a bit odd… and lacking in topical authority… So in that case, I’d still update them. But if it was a peripheral topic or off topic altogether, then I’d be much more inclined to delete them. Another consideration could be, can they be repurposed to target an adjacent lower competition keyword? So, for example say you had a post targeting ‘Backyard homesteading’… and that was high competition, maybe you could target instead ‘Backyard homesteading for beginners’ ‘Backyard homesteading in a small backyard’ or ‘Backyard homesteading when you don’t have much time’ or whatever is relevant to your site, lower competition, but still reasonable traffic volumes. You might also like to consider whether you can get traffic to that page via internal links… There are some blog posts that may never do all that well with direct Google traffic, but which you link to frequently from other posts and so get good traffic from internal link clicks. You might also like to double check the post’s backlink profile before deleting… in case it has some really strong backlinks. You can do that easily here >>> https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/inbound-links (Just make sure that you select exact page from the dropdown before pasting in your post’s link) Hope that helps! Eb 🙂

Hi Thea – great to hear this post helped you! Unfortunately, yes, if you have the date in your URLs then, if you change the date, the URL changes too. In an ideal world you would get someone to sort out your permalinks so they don’t show the date, but if you go down that route, get it done properly by someone who knows what they are doing! But you don’t have to republish when you update a post – Google knows you’ve updated a post whether you republish or not. Having a ‘last updated’ date isn’t necessary for Google but it is good for your readers – to know your content is up-to-date and still relevant… and it will also improve your click through rate from Google because people tend to click on more recent information, and Google will often show the last updated date in the search results… so in a roundabout way it is also good for SEO. Hope that helps! Eb 🙂

You’re welcome! Glad it helped 😀

Glad you found my post helpful! Wishing you all the best with your rebrand 😀