There may be many reasons for casting your thoughts back to old blog articles. Perhaps you notice that they are dated, perhaps the topic has become a hot trend once more, perhaps it’s a good article that has been forgotten, or perhaps you need inspiration for a new post. Whatever your reason, older blog posts are a handy thing – especially if they form part of an evergreen pool of content.

Some ideas for old posts:

1. Spice up the old article by adding new, up-to-date images. Giving an existing article of good quality a bit of a face-lift can be quite pleasing to the eye and inviting for users who may have passed it over due to a dated appearance.
2. Update some of the content with fresh facts or figures, replacing existing examples with those that are better known at the present time, making the content relevant.
3. Getting back to the idea of an article ‘face-lift’, why not add supplements to the article? You can add a short video, as Mobile Users Prefer Video Content, or even insert a Mini-Infographic – something which is especially complimentary to articles containing a lot of statistics.
4. Do some research on the article and add new references to keep the information you are providing up to date.
5. Use the article in a presentation, perhaps for sales collateral, and embed that presentation into the post.
6. If you have articles which can be directly connected to a central topic, bundle them into one blog post and reference all of them. For example, when writing an article on using various strategies in your content marketing campaign, reference old articles about LinkedIn strategies, how to use Facebook for your business, etc, and link them in the new article.
7. Use old articles of sound quality as lead nurturing material. Send a client a link to the article as part of follow-up communication.

Simply deleting old blog posts is not recommendable. If they make you cringe, rather update them with one of the suggestions listed above. The argument behind not deleting blog posts lies in the ‘404 Page Not Found’ error. Not only is such a result annoying to users, but errors that arise in deleting blog posts can harm your SEO performance.

That being said, there may be instances in which you really do need to delete a blog post, just because there is no hope for said post. It could be incredibly short and out of date, the information could be misleading, there may be a lack of thesis or, it may be incredibly tedious with no way of reviving the content. In such a case, where your absolute last resort is to delete the post, do it the right way. Make use of a 301 redirect and send the user to another post on your site. The difference between 404 and 301 is that the 301 informs search engines that content has moved, instead of just spitting out that the content is not found.