Old Website Content: What to Rewrite, What to Merge, What to Delete

When we take over a website with history, we almost always find the same thing: a few pages that bring in all the traffic, and a pile of content published in the years when frequency was believed to matter more than utility.

The first step isn't to write something new. It's to tidy up what already exists.

How we group pages

For each page, we look at three things: if it brings visits from search, if it answers a question the client hears from their customers, and if what's written in it is still true. The combination of these three results in four piles: to keep, to rewrite, to merge, to remove.

To rewrite

This includes pages that receive visits but contain outdated or too general information. Rewriting doesn't mean rearranging. It means new details: how that particular thing is done at our client's, what has changed in legislation or on the platform, what questions have arisen since publication.

To merge

Three weak articles on the same subject compete with each other, and none are complete. We combine them into a single one, with redirects from the old addresses, and keep the useful part from each. This is the most tedious part of the work and the one that yields the most visible results in the following months.

To remove

Old announcements, "we're moving our office" from years ago, texts copied from suppliers, public test pages. We eliminate them with a redirect to the closest relevant page, not to the homepage indiscriminately.

We also made the mistake of deleting too much. For one site, we removed an old article that seemed useless, but it was, in fact, the page to which several forums linked. We rebuilt the page and set up the correct redirect, but we lost a few weeks. Since then, we check what external links are coming in before any deletion.

In what order we work

We start with pages that bring in money, not the oldest ones. A service page that receives visits but doesn't explain the price and process deserves attention before an archived article.

Results don't appear in the same week. It depends on how often Google visits the site and how competitive the topic is. We don't know exactly how long it takes, and it doesn't make sense to give a firm deadline.

If you have a site with many old articles and don't know where to start, we'll look at your list of pages and tell you what we'd do in the first month.

The decision, put on a single page

When we take over a site with many old articles, we make a simple table where each page receives a single decision. Without it, the discussion goes around in circles in meetings.

The "leave alone" row is the one everyone forgets. Not everything that doesn't generate enquiries needs to be touched.

What we do with old addresses

Every deleted page gets a redirect to the closest useful page. Not to the homepage, all at once – Google treats this as a non-existent page and you lose what you had. It takes a few minutes per page and saves arguments six months down the line.

Deleting without a redirect is the cheapest way to lose traffic you've already paid for.

How long it takes and at what pace

It depends on how many pages there are and who writes the texts. For a site with a few dozen old articles, we'll do the inventory in a week and then work in batches, so we can see the effect. If you change two hundred pages in one day, you can no longer tell what helped.

Where we got burned

We once merged four articles into one good one and lost positions for two secondary searches that came precisely from the smaller articles. We recreated them as separate sections, with clear subheadings, and they partially returned. Since then, we check what searches each page brings in before merging it into another.

If you have a blog with articles from a few years ago and don't know what to do with them, we'll do an inventory for you and tell you what we'd rewrite, what we'd merge, and what we'd remove.

What we add after client discussions

Not after ticking off a list, but after a simple question: if a new client were to come across this topic tomorrow, would they find the answer here that would change their decision? If not, something is missing, and it's usually a practical detail, not an entire section. We revisit the texts after a few months, when we see what people are asking us on the phone and what wasn't written anywhere.