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🌰 delete a third of your content

I came across an odd idea from the Smart Passive Income Podcast by way of Tiago Forte: delete a third of your content.

The core idea here is to treat your website like a single issue of a magazine. You want to keep everything in the issue current, correct, and cohesive. National Geographic would never keep an article on their site that was incorrect: they’d update it. Better Homes and Garden would never run a story about dolphin migration patterns. Updating or even deleting a third of your content can improve your reader’s experience navigating your website, which in turn can increase your website’s traffic.

Here’s what guest Todd Tresidder proposed as a “content audit”:

  1. Run an audit every 2-3 years
  2. Go through every single piece of content on the site and categorize it as one of the following:
    • keep: perfect as-in. On-brand, up-to-date, high quality, relevant
    • update: needs small tweaks
    • consolidate: could be merged with others
    • delete: no longer relevant Note: You can use traffic stats to determine what your readers think.
  3. Now, for each category, do the following:
    • keep: keep as-is. Make tiny updates if needed.
    • update: make updates. Keep url the same or make sure old url redirects. (Update date as needed or republish as needed to make it clear that this post is relevant in the current year.)
    • consolidate: write new posts, make sure old urls all redirect, update dates as needed to republish
    • delete: remove. If there is a relevant replacement, make sure to redirect the old URLs

This works for a few reasons, claims Tresidder:

  1. It’s easier for your readers to find what they’re looking for and not get overwhelmed.
  2. Google notices all this activity, new content, etc, and ranks your website higher as something that’s being “actively maintained.”

This is also why republishing benefits your readers: if you’re on a search engine and you see two pieces of writing about something, which would you prefer: the newer thing or the older thing? In most cases, you’d assume the newer one is more relevant.

As appealing as this idea is (make your work better without creating more work!), it grates against the philosophies of blogging and historical records. Imagine if the New York Times deleted all their articles on smoking from the 1940s because they were no longer accurate. Imagine going back to a podcast episode that moved you only to find it gone. Keeping your work available as a record for yourself and others can be valuable. Blogs and social media account are designed to be journals, not magazines.

And yet blogs are magazines. Your blog post on couch reupholstering from 2002 is still the best how-to out there. But readers in 2022 want to know: how did it last? Do you still recommend doing it this way or would you change things? Are there any new tools or replacements of materials to be aware of?

Here are some ways to walk the line:

  • Republish old content with updates. NPR’s Planet Money does this well. Every so often they re-release an old podcast episode: they add an intro to explain when the piece originally aired and any temporal context, then extend the episode at the end to update listeners on what’s changed. This maintains the old content as a public record while refreshing it for new listeners who may never have found it before.
  • Consolidate with a link to the archive. One step in the audit process is to consolidate. Multiple articles on the housing market? Improve the best one, delete the rest, and have all the old urls redirect to the surviving piece. That’s still an option in a blogging world, but instead of deleting the rest, you can give them a new archive url and let the new post reference them. While the old urls will take readers to the new article, dedicated readers can find their way back if needed.

For myself, this blog is a [[🌰 Zettelkasten]]. It’s designed to constantly change, grow, expand and contract. But it’s not as polished as a magazine. Most of my pieces for now meander and think out loud. ([[🌰 it’s not about writing, it’s about thinking]]). So while the style of my work is very different from that described in the podcast, perhaps this “content audit” exercise can help sharpen my writing, thinking, and the slipbox as a tool.

Info:

Don't want to do that? @ me on twitter or mastodon

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.

Updates

  • : Added blogchain idea to 'Related to' list at the bottom.