It is Spring cleaning time. Time to rid ourselves of clutter. Of course, it’s appropriate to do this all year long, but Spring just seems so well-suited for it because it represents a fresh start.
I’ve started my Spring cleaning with my blog (next is a table in my den). Like with anything, there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways. If you are a fellow blogger, and you want to clean up your blog, you’ll want to read more so you can ensure you are not going about the wrong way.
A recent review of my Google Analytics is what alerted me to the need to clean my blog. I decided to sort the content listing by Bounce Rate, and doing so caused me to see that there were a few dozen posts that had a Stay Time of 0 seconds and a Bounce Rate of 100%. A lot of these were from my Site News category, with an example being:
Fortunately, just one person had clicked on that particular link during the 30 days reported on, but that person immediately left the site (and may never return). When you have a lot of that happening, it’s not good.
The simplest thing to do with these posts would be to just delete them and forget about them. That would not be the right thing to do, though. You’ll wind up generating a lot of 404 (not found) results, and that could adversely impact the quality score each search engine assigns to your site.
The right way to go about it is to delete each of the unwanted posts, add an appropriate 410 redirect to your .htaccess file (for each deletion), update your sitemap.xml file (so none of the deleted posts are in it), and use the Remove URLs feature in the Google Webmaster Tools to remove each of these deleted links from the Google Index.
Okay, that was a mouthful. To illustrate the 410 redirects, here are some examples from my .htaccess file:
Redirect 410 /a-couple-of-site-changes/
Redirect 410 /admin-note/
Redirect 410 /miscellaneous-admin-information/
Redirect 410 /your-input-appreciated/
Redirect 410 /please-ensure-feeds-link-updated/
Redirect 410 /boredom-strikes-again/
Redirect 410 /revised-posting-schedule/
Redirect 410 /what-are-your-thoughts-on-this/
Redirect 410 /implemented-security-update-sorry-for-any-hiccup/
Redirect 410 /get-a-free-issue-of-smartphone-magazine-from-me/
As you can tell from the titles, all of these were little tidbits that I probably should never have written up. They were close to worthless at the time they were written (several months ago), and are completely worthless now. They are worse than worthless: keeping them around hurts me.
By the way, a 410 redirect tells the search engine (or anyone who encounters it by looking for the deleted page) that the page has been permanently removed. By telling that to the search engines, it helps ensure they won’t keep looking for it.
As for using the Google URL Removal Tool, you can find it under the Tools section in the Google Webmaster Tools:
Before you request that a link be removed from Google’s index of your site, you should first make sure the link really is indexed. As an example, before adding the link “/a-couple-of-site-changes” to my requests for removal, I verified that it had been indexed by doing the following Google search:
a couple of site changes site:www.keenerliving.com
So far I have removed about 20 worthless old articles, and probably have at least that many to go. It feels pretty darned good to be getting rid of some of the old stuff that is no good (and never really was).
My friend RuudHein just mentioned to me on Twitter that there is a plugin that can be very helpful for this: http://bit.ly/oMbA
Commending you for the tip, I have mixed thoughts. If you wrote something, why wouldn’t you want to keep it, if for no other reason than, for your own posterity and to see how you’ve matured?
Hi Ari,
Thank you much for the comment. An interesting perspective, and, to a degree, I share it. But, in my case, there are several posts that are just worthless … ones where I mention that I have a new site design (several of those when I experimented a lot), ones that apologize for my former server’s poor performance, and so on. They add no value, but sometimes people land on them, and bounce right away, leaving with a perhaps sour impression of my blog. It is those posts that I am cleaning out.
The ones that I could have said better, but are still relevant nonetheless, get to stay and I get to learn from them, as you say.
It would help immensely if I could ever make my mind up whether I just want this to be a personal blog, or a professional blog. It has the flavorings of both. Ultimately, I just want the content to help folks. But, that is too broad of a generalization, so I need to square up better with what sort of posts I really want to write, and resist the temptation to write about everything that interests me.
Anyway, I digressed. But, thanks for the comment and for making me think.