Deleting Your Old Site May Hurt Your Google Ranking – I recently had a long-term client re-brand their nonprofit which included a new logo and a spanking new website. When we started it was a one-man show, which grew into a big organization with a Board of Directors and several employees.
The marketing company in charge of the project did a wonderful job from a look and feel standpoint. They built a nice WordPress theme, and I don’t have too many negative comments to say about the development work in general.
I like to give credit where credit is due. And as I will be managing the site going forward, it’s always nice to start with quality work rather than having to go in and rebuild everything.
Now we had worked hard to create quality content and had close to 1000 pages in Google’s index. They ditched all the old content and now the site is being penalized by Google as it went from 1000 page website down to a 15 page site.
It is only common sense that a 15 page website no matter how nice is not as good from a search engine standpoint as having 1000 pages of quality content.
RELATED: WordPress Users Resistance To Gutenberg
Listen, we work too hard to create quality content. So consider this when you’re building a new website. My recommendation is to bring over the old content, especially blog posts and news. Perhaps you have a link to these pages from within your site so that they’re still picked up by the Googlebot.
On your new blog/news page, on the sidebar for example you can have a link to the older content. What I would do is put the old posts in a category all by themselves, call them archive, older news, whatever you feel like.
So this way you will have your fresh new good-looking site but we’ll still have a link off to your older content which Google will be able to find as it is hyperlinked from an existing page. So, this may be the best of both worlds.
