Ask Yoast: how to clean up old blog posts

Ben Anderson asks:
“If you have a company blog with a lot of old posts that vary highly in relevance, can you describe a good process to follow when working through them and what actions to take when it comes to SEO?”

Joost answers:
“It’s fairly simple. You can go through all your old posts and you should probably do this every year or so, and look at each post and decide: is this still relevant or even factual? In that case keep it. Or: this not so relevant anymore, but there’s relevance to it, so it needs to be updated. In that case: update it, or make a list and update it one by one. Or: this is not relevant anymore, or it has so completely changed that I should write something new about it. In that case: delete it.
If you delete it you have to consider what to do with the page you’ve just deleted. You can either redirect it to another relevant page on your site, if you have one. Or, if you don’t have a relevant page, maybe you should create one. If you can create a relevant page anymore, either redirect to the homepage or serve a so called 410 header, which is something that we make fairly easy to do within our Yoast SEO plugin. Good luck!”

[BrownDogIsInTheHouse]

Thank you for a useful video. If I make changes to old blog posts with new keywords will Google be able to index them with the new keyword or will it only remember the earlier content and look at the earlier keywords? Does changing the title of olde blog post affect the ranking

[garyblouin]

Not sure if redirecting a deleted article to the home page is a good idea Leads to a bad user experience and if you don't return a response header of 404 or 410, it will cause soft 404s. If you have too many of these type of redirects, will raise warnings from search engines.

[Smartbridge]

I worry about removing old posts that aren't relevant. Our blog isn't that large, and it might make it look like we don't blog enough if people are scrolling through the pages. Would it be better if we placed a large box on top of the content, stating something like, "Find newer, more relevant blog posts about ____ by visiting At least that shows credibility that we've been blogging about something for a longer time.