Can we talk about that old 'never delete anything' advice from early webmasters?

Back in 2006, I was running a small fan site on GeoCities. This guy on a webmaster forum, username 'PixelJockey', told me in a thread to never, ever delete old posts or pages, just archive them. He said search engines loved deep, old content and it built trust. I listened, and for years my site was a mess of broken links and ancient 'under construction' GIFs. I finally cleaned it up in 2012, and my traffic actually went up because the site wasn't a ghost town of dead ends. PixelJockey meant well, but that advice was from a different internet. It locked me into a bad habit for nearly six years. Has anyone else dug up and ignored some old forum wisdom that just didn't age well?

2 comments

2 Comments

reese5501mo ago

Yeah, I was totally in that camp too. My first blog had pages from like 2004 that were just lists of broken links to other dead blogs. I thought it made the site look big and established. But then I realized no one was clicking past page two of the archives, and the stuff that did get found was just wrong or useless. Clearing all that out felt scary, like I was losing history, but it just made the actual good content easier to find.

brian3031mo ago

My old band's website from 2005 still has a "Links" page with 27 dead GeoCities URLs. I get what you're saying, @reese550, but sometimes that old junk is the only proof something existed. I'd rather have a few broken links than a site that feels like it started yesterday. Cleaning is good, but wiping everything feels like rewriting history for no real reason.