Properly Removing Old Blog Posts On WordPress

A person who maintains a blog wants to know how they can delete some old and irrelevant blog posts from it. Their site is powered on WordPress. The person stated that they do not have any internal links within the posts. The posts are categorized and tagged. The person wants to know how to properly delete the posts, and they have four ideas on how to do it. Those ideas are just deleting; creating a 301 redirect to the main page; adding a 410 content deleted header as explained on the Yoast website; or just checking the 'noindex' option in their SEO plugin.

One person wrote back and said to 410 the posts that the original poster wants permanently gone from their website. If the person writes new or updated content on an old blog post, then they would need to use a 301 for it. The person went on to say that allowing a 404 to happen could cause a drop in the Google ranking, but a 410 could actually give it a boost because it demonstrates that the web master knows how to properly manage their website.

Another person wrote back and said that it would be better to delete the old posts and add some fresh content at the same time. Another person suggested simply rewriting the old blog posts with fresher and more relevant content. Someone else suggested that the original poster use Google Analytics and find out how much traffic they get from the blog posts that they plan to delete. If any of those pages generates a tidy sum of traffic, then it would be best to do a 301 and redirect the visitor to another page on the site that has similar content.

One other person added that having a few 404s will not be the end of a site's first-page ranking on Google. It would be bad to have hundreds of 404s, but a few would not be a problem. Even so, this person also recommended doing an internal redirect with a 301 so that the visitor can access content that's similar. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/dvp7u3/howtoproperlydeleteoldblogposts/.