Over the past 20 years of this site, there have been only a few times that I took the step of deleting old blog posts from this site.
If the notion of deleting old blog posts from your site seems inherently wrong to you, I understand. For the most part, it seems wrong to me as well.
Old posts can always be recycled into new posts, after all. (That’s assuming you stay at it long enough to have posts that might qualify as “old.”) But over the years, I have come up with three reasons deleting old blog posts aren’t a terrible idea.
1. It’s full of broken links.
Unfortunately, broken links are part of the internet. Sometimes, a site gets deleted or content expires. Some content is only licensable for a finite period of time. If you link to that content and it eventually expires, you’ll be met with a dead of broken link.
When I moved this blog from the AOL Journals community to Blogger and then to WordPress, there were plenty of posts that pointed to AOL blogs. Some people left AOL at about the same time I did. When they did, since they deleted their old blogs, anyone who’d linked to them had broken links.
Some news sites have finite periods during which news articles will stay up. If you’ve linked to an article that disappears, naturally, the link will no longer work.
But when you’re writing about a news article or a blogger’s take on something, you can’t copy and paste their content on your site. That would be plagiarism. It’s not bad to post a short excerpt and then link to the full post. But if the full post disappears, you no longer have the original to refer to. Unless you’ve told the whole story on your site, it may not make sense to keep your post up since there’s no longer the source page to point your readers to.
2. It’s no longer relevant.
Sometimes, I’ll find a post that was almost in the style of a Facebook post. There was some issue I was struggling with or some worry that I had. But at some point, the issue obviously resolved itself. There’s nothing to explain the outcome, so the post really has no use.
What makes a blog post relevant, exactly? Well, that’s fairly subjective. But as a blogger, I have to decide when I go back and read on old post whether it makes any different all these years later.
If I feel I can’t easily recycle it into a new post that is relevant, there’s a good chance I’ll just quietly trash it.
3. You changed your mind.
I can imagine this one might upset a few people. You take a position on something only to find months or even years later that you no longer agree with yourself!
You could always write a new post, link to the old one and then explain why you changed your mind. That could always be an interesting post.
The issue, however, comes with that old post. The old post itself doesn’t explain (unless you carefully re-edit) that you did change your mind. So if someone were to find the old post, they might think you still feel the way you now no longer do.
You might be better off pulling the salient points out of the old post, then write into a new one why you used to feel the way you do and — more importantly — why you changed your mind. That might be far more informative.
