There may come a time when you want or need to stop blogging. But, what if you still want people to find your old content and benefit from it?

To stop blogging while maintaining your current search engine positions, you’ll need to incorporate it into your blogging exit strategy; it will require you to be proactive with your website’s maintenance, even if you will not be adding fresh content. That’s the difference between mothballing a blog and just abandoning it.

Why Blogs Fall in the SERPs

A cornerstone of blogs and blogging — the ease of obtaining natural back links. When a blog no longer has fresh content added to it, the inbound link counts dwindle.

Another reason that a page may fall in rankings is due to relevance; after a certain period of time elapses, the content is no longer relevant.

Also, when you stop updating a website regularly, it’s a signal to the spiders to crawl your website less often. This means that any changes you do make to the site will take longer to be noticed.

When you know this, you will then need to plan for it and make concessions when you begin the process of shutting down your blog.

Spruce Up Your Content

Before you call it quits, take a few days to go through some of your more important past entries and make sure they are updated.

Tweak any dates, facts, errors (spelling, grammar, or otherwise), and make sure that your on page optimization is up to par.

A good way of determining which entries to focus on is to look at your logs; see which keywords land visitors on which pages. The pages that crop up most often are the ones that you want to maintain rankings for and the ones lower on the list are the ones you need to improve rankings for.

Continue Building Your Links

Just as you need a regular link building campaign for a static website, you also need one for a blog. The key, however, is to build links to your internal pages and not just the home page of the blog. The idea is to have individual pages rank in the SERPs, not just the blog’s home page.

Make sure the link building is natural and occurs over time. Any dramatic spike in links for an old page may set off some alarms.

Check in on the Site Regularly

One of my old sites was gone from the face of the Internet and I didn’t even realize it for nearly 6 months. The blog was in a mothballed state and the server it was on was hacked. The host never told us about it, I only discovered it when a friend saw some weird errors on the site and e-mailed me about it.

Upon further inspection, none of the permalinks worked (each returned a 404 error) and the pages that did work had huge MySQL errors plastered all over it. As a result, the site lost strong #1–10 rankings for handsome keywords in all of the major search engines.

From that small lesson, I now know to check up on each of my sites at least once every couple of weeks. Catching a problem like that early means that you can salvage the site, along with your rankings, before the next spider crawl.

When all is said and done, your blog has just become a static website and it needs to be treated as one, which needs regular maintenance over time.

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