Blog SEO question
 

Wonder if someone can help with this question . . .

I have an old blog. I want to delete the blog - everything : all posts, all pages, everything - and start again with a freshly-installed blog. So I want to delete one site and create another.

Will SEs penalize me for this? :helpme

Those pages will be lost once the spyders craw the site a few times. So any SE traffic going to specific pages will be lost. Best thing to do is to redirect the traffic to your main page.

Even if you don't change the topic of the blog you will likely lose traffic. It will eventually come back assuming the SE like's the new blog set up.

if you don't have any traffic go ahead.
Otherwise leave the posts be.

you will lose all your traffic.

I would just set up a new blog. Domains are $10 or less depending on your volume... once a site is up, it practically costs nothing to "operate". If you delete all of those pages, the search engines do not have that same text to read and spider... therefore, that traffic disappears.

Traffic is negligible; mostly i'm concerned with getting penalized by the search engines.

It's basically the domain I like and not the content.

Just digesting the advice before I make a decision...

google doesn't really care IMO. I had domains going from humor sites to TGPs to blogs and still getting Google traffic, recently turned one my fake TGPs into blog and it already gets 300+ Google hits daily, I don't think you have anything to worry about

also turned one of my Joomla running celeb sites into a Wordpress blog, deleted all the old content, wrote fresh posts - still no problem

Thanks for taking the time guys, I appreciate it. :)

if you keep the content the same you should have absolutely zero to worry about.

Didn't she say she was deleting all the content?

some very old very relevant websites have been known to completely redesign and change their sites, so it would be irresponsible for google to punish a site for changing all their links around... of course old links would die and the traffic from them would disappear, but new links should not suffer any kind of penalty from this kind of thing (making a custom 404 redirect is something I like to do if you aren't going to bother with 302s)

I would be careful about deactivating the site while you are thinking of or making the changes, I think that is much more of a problem if you end up parking or having the homepage down for too long than just starting over with all new pages

Google cares ... trust me!!! Google sees and hears everything! :BangBang:

Go ahead and delete it, if you want to start fresh. Don't forget to have your posts/site de-indexed from Google too, its not critical but its good if you do. An option to remove my site from index is available in google webmaster tools.

By the way, there is no penalty for deleting and re-building site.

Some of the websites I use change every few years when the government departments shuffle around. Rather than reworking the existing structure they just kill everything and do it from scratch - which leaves all of the existing deep links (both from third party sites and their own content) pointing to generic 404 pages...

If they were a commercial company I'd tell the boss to shoot the IT dept for wasting all that traffic and making the user's experience that much harder.

i mean nichewise. if you buy a milf site and throw up a new milf site, they won't punish you any. i've bought out blogs, wiped them clean and tossed my own content into them without noticing any negative effect several times. they usually wind up moving upwards...

When faced with the same decision, I opted to rewrite old links to a new blog and keep the old content available, but not link it anywhere. You'll still get residual traffic for years by doing this (provided it's linked to already, and contains actually useful information).

if you delete the posts google doesn't care from my experience. i've done it a few times and it hasn't hurt my blogs at all.

Thanks for the answers guys. I've opted to delete and start over. The traffic was negligible and it's possible i'd be using a similar linking structure. Domain is so good, it had to be with this site.

And baddog, after all these years you should know i'm a guy - with a wife and 2 kids lol

Sorry, never paid close enough attention I guess. Kristian is a female name here. Christian would be the male version.

where do you get domains for $10?

That's right. It's a popular female name in the U.S and a very rare male name. I remember looking it up when I first arrived here and encountered the gender confusion. It's more popular in the EU because its of Scandinavian descent.

I will try to avoid flirting with you in the future.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You got to love forums :error

The rule of thumb is to never take down anything once you put it online. When I look back at all of the web pages I had put on line, I wish all of them were still up.