What effect does deleting old page or post have on your SEO ranking? There are numerous ideas and thoughts about what effect this action can have on your SEO and your website appearance on the Google search engine. First let me point put that deleting pages and posts does not necessarily have adverse effect on your entire website, but it also depends on your approach to the situation and that is what we shall be discussing in this article.

One factor you might want to look at before making the decision to delete your old post or pages are whether the content has any valuable links and whether or not it is a spammy in nature. If you just wrote a post and did not care about all the details of SEO, then there are chances that the content is not super valuable so deleting suck content won’t have any effect on your SEO ranking.

Pros and Cons of  Deleting an old page or post.

The types of content you might want to delete and not expect any consequences are:

1. Old content that has short word count, under 1000 words, or even shorter words
2. Non valuable content that does not have any links, data or information.
3. Old contents that stick in keywords to try to hit all the sweet spots for old SEO ranking
4. Old contents that stick in links regardless of whether those links are not relevant to the subject matter
5. duplicate content on your website or content that is an exact carbon copy from other websites. To analyze your website, you can run your site through Copyscape and give it a quick plagiarism audit.

It is important to note that any content that still has valuable links, some valuable data or insights, or that is simply lengthy original content is fine to keep. This kind of content are not harming your SEO ranking. The kind of content likely to do harm to your website ranking are the low quality and short words content.

So in Summary, personally, I would be careful with deleting old page or post for simply being old, you do want to cut down on low-quality posts (or better yet improve them), but you definitely don’t want to end up deleting a bunch of blog posts that could be generating monthly traffic to your website. Using Google Analytics to determine which blog posts get traffic and which don’t would be where I would start.

Also if you do delete some blog posts, it is a good idea to setup a 301 redirect on them if there is a page it makes sense to redirect to.

In our previous post, we highlighted importance of website security, you can click on the button below to read.