Should I delete past blogs that are "unoptimized"?

[Adammcconnell]

Hi guys,

I was recently brought on to do basic contracted content marketing for an ecommerce website built on Shopify. They have a ton of old blogs that were written with NO keywords in mind. The meta tags are totally different for what they want to get found for, links, ALT tags, etc. Should I delete all of those blog posts? Or just start optimizing new blogs?

Thanks so much,

Adam

[EGOL]

See if any of those old blog posts are pulling in traffic or links.  Maybe you will be surprised.  If they are pulling in current traffic improve them.  If they are not pulling in current traffic and the content is good, work with it.  If the content is crap and pulling no traffic then you might redirect it.

In the past few days I did some slight revisions to an existing article to put a different spin on it.  Then linked to it from my blog.  One of my competitors linked to it and I am amazed at the traffic they are sending to me.  I thought that I owned this niche.... not I gotta go see what they are doing.

Another article written four years ago, was in need of an update and ranking at about position #19.   So I wrote to the company who is the leader in the field, asking if they would allow me to use a few images and answer a couple questions.  I was surprised that the owner wrote back and gave me a lot of help - great images and great information.  Enough to make the article "best-on-the-web".   That was early this month.  Now my article is on the first page of Google.

[TomRayner]

The only thing I would ask is: What do you aim to achieve by deleting them?

They may not be 'optimised' posts, but if they aren't doing any harm - and by that I mainly been duplicate or thin content - then I don't see any reason to delete them.  There is a school of thought as well is that a site with more indexed pages will, roughly speaking, be seen more as an authority site (and we all know Google loves authority).

So I'd not worry about them and focus on your fresh content and just optimise them.  I'll just say as well, you don't always want to write with keywords in mind - your audience should be the primary goal, but of course it pays to have keywords in things like title tags, h1s and metas etc.  Just don't stuff the thing with the keyword throughout (I'm sure you already knew this).

TL;DR - No worries mate, just write away!

[Adammcconnell]

Thanks Tom, your insights are really helpful! I appreciate the time you took to respond.

[Adammcconnell]

EGOL, thank you! I'll try re-working a couple of the popular blog posts. Appreciated!