Impact of Ranking by Deleting Posts by Mistake in WordPress

Update:

The posts which I had deleted by mistake are indexed and are ranking well. However, the overall traffic to the blog is declining. This is due to zero activity from my end.

Blogging has been contributed significant income from the beginning. However, I haven’t spent much time on it as much as it deserves.

I’m ‘considerably free’ now and I plan to get back into blogging more seriously and cover a wider niche.

Background of the problem :

Recently we were cleaning up our blog – TechBuzz . TechBuzz was started in 2007 and has been a pet project since then.

In between, the blog was filled up with – not so important – content, which was irrelevant now (old or technology was outdated), written just for the sake of it and a few were – rants :).

Content Clean Up

I decided to ‘clean’ up the content and keep, as much as possible, relevant and updated information on the blog.

What I did

This is what I did :

1. Went through old posts which I felt were unnecessary. This was really a tough task and boring too. (Haven’t completed this task, and will gradually do it, as and when I find time)
2. Logged into Google Analytics and made a list of all those posts, which have got less than 10 page-views and exported them to an excel-sheet.
3. Logged into TechBuzz as admin and deleted the posts that were in the excel-sheet.

What Went Wrong

This is where few things went wrong. While deleting, I somehow managed to get a few good performing posts deleted (can add myself to Indian Superheros list here).  Some of them which were deleted by mistake are :

Resuming indexing services in windows,  Solve WhatsApp stuck at initializing problem and if you have iPhone – use multiple instances of WhatsApp, play a prank on your friends by flipping their windows screen, find and trace vehicle numbers and details.

If teamviewer commercial use is suspected then you have an option to reinstall teamviewer after trial has expired and you can get your teamviewer partners password.

These changes were made last week – somewhere between March 2nd, 2017 and March 4th, 2017. I was too involved in learning about Home Automaton in India at Internet of Everything Event.

Impact of Deleting WordPress Posts by Mistake

Cleaning up unnecessary post will have a long term, hopefully positive, effect. I hope for positive results because, we are making our blog more relevant, and ‘present’ in terms of data.

However, deleting posts that were performing well, has resulted in loss of traffic. Some of the posts mentioned above were deindexed in a matter of 2 –  3 days after deleting them (by mistake).

Lesson to be learnt here is that, we need to be extra cautious while deleting the data, and ensure we do not scrap good posts.

Way Forward

For time being, I’ve restored all the posts. As I was unsure, which posts had brought the traffic down, first off, I restored all the posts.

Now, I have a fair idea, which were the posts that were pulled down, due to which traffic went down (Google Analytics helped me get this data by doing a simple comparison with relative period last week), I’m hoping that these posts will be re-indexed as soon as I can hope.

I’ll make a list of posts that need to be deleted, and will delete each one of them gradually. Though it’s a time consuming process, I’m sure that it’s well worth the time spent.

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Do share your experiences, if any in similar conditions and how you were able to solve the issue.