489 blog posts, delete or keep them?

What you think he should do, versus what is best for him/her are two entirely different things. Google loves to put the best answer in front of people searching in the shortest time possible. If the content is crap, it won't help him/her one bit.

Hi there.

This is what you do.

1. A quick reference in ahrefs using their backlinks tool. Check "Live", and look at the domains. Go through them one by one. If they are relevant to your content, put them aside.

2. By relevancy I mean the following:
- Would it make sense for a user on that page to follow the link to mine?
- Is the content on the external domain of any value, or is it easily seen as spam?
- Is it obvious, in any way, that the link is built to game the algo's?

3. Go through Google Search Console. All posts that have not received clicks the past 12 months (6 if you're stricter) is put a side for purging.

4. Start with the content you want to delete completely, and have those URLs serve a 404. No need to redirect unless you're actually seeing traffic from it. A 404 will tell search engines (content is gone) to eventually drop these out of the serps.

5. With the list of links you want to retain, either a) create a new, fresh and improved piece of content that consolidates multiple posts/pages and redirect the old URL to the new one, or b) redirect them all to the homepage.

6. Go through your website and fix all broken links. Don't do 301's unless you absolutely have to. The less you have, the better. The reason I am saying this is that redirect chains might cause you harm in the future with Core Web Vitals, + a bunch of other shit you can't really prepare for unless you're super experienced. Less 301s is damage control in practice.

7. Update sitemap.

8. Don't add everything to one category. Really. Kill your darlings, and provide value, or don't bother at all.

9. Structure, structure and more structure.

10. Update old content to reflect whatever the landscape is of whatever product you're reviewing today.

11. Bonus: make sure you're not disallowing spiders to visit the pages you wan't gone.

7.

That would be another way to avoid problems.



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