After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details).
I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong?
Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog.
Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about.
If anyone is interested in having a look:
- https://vivaldi.com
- https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily]
- https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]