Increasing Traffic - Avoid Deleting Old Pages
(c) 2010 - Win Google's Love: Increasing Website Traffic - Don't Delete Content, Archive It
Tip 12: Deleting is for Dummies
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Don't delete old pages... just bury them deeper.
You want your site to grow larger over time, so unless your content is seriously out-of-date or inaccurate, there's usually no need to delete it. If it's old news, bury it away in your site's archives, but still make it accessible through a trail of clickable links.
Example:
This is a tale of two websites. Heather and Lynn both have high-quality sites with current movie reviews. Both sites have an excellent layout, easy navigation, eye-catching graphics, and credible writers who post movie reviews every week.
Heather's site removes the reviews that are more than three months old. She figures her site should focus only on the most current movies, and nobody's reading the old reviews anyway.
Lynn keeps her old reviews on the site, even though she is constantly adding new ones. Her site is just as up-to-date as Heather's, but after a couple of years, Lynn's site has 10,000 articles whereas Heather's only has 200.
Whose site do you think will perform better in Google? Lynn's, of course, because her site is filled with more quality content!
Don't delete your old, outdated content. Archive it instead.
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