What To Do With An Old Blog Nobody Reads

Most businesses have one. A blog that got twenty posts in the first six months, four in the next year, and nothing since.

It sits there looking abandoned, and the question is what to do with it.

First, find out if it is actually dead

Before deciding anything, look at the data.

Open Search Console and sort the pages by impressions over the last twelve months. Not clicks, impressions. Clicks tell you what is winning. Impressions tell you what Google is already showing to someone, which is what you can improve.

Most abandoned blogs have two or three posts quietly getting impressions on terms nobody intended to target. Those posts are the asset. Everything else is weight.

The three options

Update and consolidate. For the posts with impressions, and for clusters of thin posts covering the same topic.

Five 400-word posts about the same subject compete with each other and none of them ranks. Merged into one genuinely useful 1,500-word page, with the old URLs redirected to it, they frequently start ranking within a couple of months.

This is the option that produces results, and it is the one almost nobody chooses because it looks like less work than it is.

Leave it and start again. If the old content is not embarrassing and not ranking, it costs you nothing to leave it and publish forward from today.

The one condition is that the blog must not look abandoned. A "latest posts" module showing 2022 is worse than no blog. Either remove the dates or remove the module.

Delete it. Correct when the content is wrong, off-brand, or written by someone whose name you no longer want on the site.

Delete properly: redirect each URL to the most relevant page that still exists, not all of them to the homepage. A bulk redirect to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and you get nothing from it.

The mistake everyone makes

Deleting everything and starting a fresh blog at a new URL path.

You lose whatever authority the old URLs had, the redirects usually get done badly, and you have thrown away the only real advantage an old blog has, which is age.

Fixing what you keep

For every post worth keeping:

• Check the facts. Anything with a year in it, a price, or a reference to a tool that no longer exists.
• Fix the title. Most old posts have titles written for nobody.
• Add internal links to the pages that make you money. Old posts frequently link nowhere useful.
• Update the date only if you genuinely updated the content. Changing a date on unchanged content fools nobody worth fooling.

Then decide whether to keep going

The real question underneath "what do I do with the old blog" is usually "should I be blogging at all".

The honest answer is that it works when it is consistent and specific, and it does nothing when it is neither. Ten posts a year of genuine substance beat forty generic ones, and both beat the abandoned blog you are currently looking at.

If you are going to restart, decide the cadence first and make it one you will actually hold. That is a planning decision rather than a writing one.