If you write a regular blog, you might have years’ and years’ worth of old blogs sitting on your website. When was the last time you read through them and tidied them up? Perhaps the answer is you never have. If this is the case, there’s no need to feel bad; most people will post blogs, share them around on social media, link them to other sites, and then entirely forget about them because they’ve moved onto something else.

Photo, Sincerely Media.

However, if you can take a little time, perhaps just an hour or two each month, to check through your older posts and update them or remove them as you see fit, you’ll be helping your blog and your website out hugely. Here are some of the reasons why.

1. Security: If you have a lot of old content on your site and you haven’t been blogging very much more recently, you might have a security issue on your hands. This is because a hacker will look at your site and determine that it’s not in use anymore; or very rarely. This will give them a chance to launch a cyberattack to steal any information they can, or to use your site as a platform to send out viruses to as many other sites as possible; they will feel as though no one is going to notice.

To prevent this from happening, there are a few things you can do. The first is that you can undergo cyber security training. This will help you to understand the threats that might be lurking, and how to keep your site safe and secure. Another option is to retire the site completely. If you’re no longer using it and the visitor figures are low, or they no longer matter because you’ve moved onto other things, then deleting the site will prevent any cyberattacks, and it will save you money if you’re paying for hosting.

The final option is to repurpose your old posts. Take a look at them and see if there are any ways to update them. It might be as simple as adding a couple of paragraphs, or you might need to rewrite the entire thing. By doing this, which way works best, your site will become current again, and hackers will be less likely to attack. Plus people will start visiting again.

2. SEO: It’s likely that the whole point of having a blog in the first place is to do with SEO (search engine optimisation). By having a blog on your site, you can have regularly changing content, you can link to other high-ranking sites, you can include video, and you can have keywords across your site. You may even have people reach out to you to ask if they can place niche edits on your posts. All of these are good things and will help your site be found more quickly when people are searching for whatever it is you are selling or writing about.

The problem is, a lot of old blogs that are out of date and have essentially been left to gather virtual dust can have the opposite effect, and can actually be bad for your SEO. They are seen as poor quality content, and this is penalised by Google and other search engines because, to rank highly, your site must be a valuable one that people are going to want to visit. The more old content, the less value the search engines will determine you have.

Photo, Marvin Meyer.

3. Brand Image: You only have one chance to make a good first impression, and your website therefore needs to look great and be completely up to date. Visitors who arrive on your site after searching for something, clicking through from a social media link, or heading to your site organically, don’t want to land somewhere that is old news. They don’t want to find old information that doesn’t make sense and isn’t relevant to what they’re searching for.

If this happens, your brand image can suffer; it will seem as though you don’t really know what you’re talking about and that you don’t have the right information. You’ll be eclipsed by those who do.

Removing or repurposing some of the older blogs that are now out of date and can be changed in some way means that not only do you get new content, but your site is always going to have the correct information on it. It might take a little while to go through it all, and it will be an ongoing job, but it will be worth it in the long term when your search engine rankings improve and your site is visited a lot more.