How to Quickly Decommission a WordPress Blog – Without Losing (too much) Search Ranking

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Blogging seemed easy... so tempting...

It seemed so easy: you can set up WordPress in 5 minutes or less! And buying a domain name is just a click of the mouse. But…

These supposedly harmless, innocuous little blogs have become stale, stinking up your hosting account. You risk confusing your readers… and the distraction costs you time better spent on your main blog.

I can relate. I’ve always been a sucker for the dangerous ladies of Distraction and Confusion.

Never fear:

We’re going to help you dismantle those broken down, half witted, half baked, seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-the-time blogs – and roll all that hard work into something you can use, right now, without losing any of your (likely very small) traffic to those practically moribund blogs.

Here’s my story:

1. Problem:I’ve got more blogs right now than I can handle.
2. Solution: Condense into two blogs: one focused on WordPress (Website In A Weekend), the other on everything else (There Is No Box).

I have around 400,000 words published on these two blogs, and likely another 100,000 words published on all the rest combined. No need to throw those words away. That would be wasteful. So, “decommission” some blogs.

Why decommission a blog?

At some point, you decide you no longer wish to continue working on a particular blog. Perhaps you have lost your passion and no longer have inspiration to continue writing. Perhaps the maintenance load is too high; decommissioning reduces your maintenance load:

• No need to update WP versions or plugins.
• No need to maintain backups, which costs server space somewhere.

Maybe you have two niches that are growing more together than apart, with one growing much faster than the other. Decommissioning allows you to continue posting material on an irregular basis to get it indexed in search engines. New material relevant to the decommissioned site could come in as pages and subpages, instead of as posts.

In short, you went to the trouble to write in the first place, give it a fresh start in a new home.

Decommissioning basic concepts

The most effective – and easiest – technique for decommissioning is to simply blow the site away. Delete it! No fuss, no muss, you just lightened your load.

Given you want to keep your work (and you should), here’s a few considerations:

• Biggest question: Save SERPs, or don’t care about SERPs?

  If don’t care about preserving past search results from the blog to be decommissioned, it’s easy, just copy and redirect domain.

  If you do want to preserve search results, it’s harder. You may have to bring posts over one at a time, adding redirects at the server level. One way to handle broken, changed permalinks is classify a group that moves the same way, and move them all at once. Another way is to move posts one at a time, let Google work it out on the search index side, with a customized 404 page handling requests coming through for old link. Handling redirects is an art form, worthy of it’s own discussion in a future article.

  You can split the difference: Redirect everything on the decommissioned blogs to point to a post or page on new blog.

• Explain what’s going on to existing readers. Add a “top-level” post to suck up server redirections from the domain where the blog is being decommissioned.
• Create a category for the posts on from the decommissioned blog. This category may be a child of an existing category on your blog, or may be a top level category for itself, with subcategories corresponding to the decommissioned blogs categories.
• Decide how to date incoming material. You may want to preserve original publication dates, or you may want to schedule new material into the future.
• Watch your server level 404 logs, not just your WordPress blog 404 (e.g., as handled by Redirection plugin).

Blowing away “Reason Why Advertising”

ReasonWhyAdvertising.info was built for a couple of different reasons. I found a PDF file of the original book, and I wanted to see what kind of “Speed of Implementation” it would take to get a blog up and running with the entire PDF file posted (3 hours total). I was curious how to post very long content, whether as posts or pages. And I wanted to grab some traffic for that domain name.

In any case, my current policy of posting very long articles as separate posts and pages is a result of not spending much time thinking about the problem. I don’t have time to care about traffic to the domain; Website In A Weekend keeps me plenty busy!

1. Create a Reason Why Advertising introduction page explaining what’s going on.
2. Copy all the posts from Reason Why Advertising into subpages of the introduction page on Website In A Weekend, then link all the subpages from the introduction page for a table of contents.
3. Write a Reason Why Advertising blog post that points to the parent page.

4. Redirect the top level domain reasonwhyadvertising.info to the Reason Why Advertising introduction page. Feel free to be clever to use the appropriate regular expressions to capture search results for all the pages you’re deleting. If you used an “addon” domain on a shared hosting account at Bluehost (or similar), you will something similar to the following in your .htaccess file:

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^reasonwhyadvertising.info$ [OR]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reasonwhyadvertising.info$
   RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/website\-in\-a\-weekend\.net\/reason\-advertising\/" [R=301,L]

5. Get one last, valid backup from the reasonwhyadvertising.info blog, including images, etc.
6. Get a fresh, valid backup from Website In A Weekend with all the new Reason Why pages backed up.
7. Delete the database. Check the wp_config.php very carefully. This step is irrevocable!
8. Delete all the files and subdirectories from the blog directory except the .htaccess file. All files related to the reasonwhyadvertising.info are now removed from the hosting account.

This is about an hour’s work, outside of looking up (and testing) the regular expression necessary for redirecting the traffic.

Decommissioning may take longer than starting up

Unless you care nothing at all about your search results, decommissioning a blog may take several days or more. Or rather, it may need to be spread out over many days, and not all those days may be consecutive.

This is especially important if you plan to roll blog posts into your publishing stream at a later date. Then you may have to revisit redirection links as material from the old blog is republished on the new blog.

If you are bringing all the published material over and preserving the original date of publication, it’s much easier.

Recommission blogs when traffic and content permit

Once a commercially viable amount of content is posted, the blog can be “recommissioned.” The recommissioning process is essentially the same as splitting your blog, reverse: 1. Set up your new blog on the domain, 2. copy over the content, and 3. set the redirects appropriately. Watch for an article on recommissioning in the future.

An hour of free consulting to the first person who correctly identifies which series of posts Website In A Weekend is going to split off to form a new blog on a dedicated domain. An extra hour for guessing the domain. Offer expires 1 month after publication date.