112 Blog Posts… Trashed.

Last week, my son and I marked a big task off our todo list: Getting him his first vehicle. He’s 16 and wanted a pickup truck. And after spending 3-4 weeks looking for it… we finally got it. And I picked up a used Toyota Tacoma for him and he loves it.

Crazy that now BOTH of my kids are driving themselves around. Time flies, man. 🤪 But, I’m also really proud of him because… outside of a few thousand bucks my wife and I helped him with, he is buying this vehicle himself with money he has made mowing lawns and doing things around the neighborhood for clients. And he intends to put this truck to use to make more money.

Yeah, I’m raising a little entrepreneur. 😇

Anyway, yup… I currently have 112 blog posts sitting in my trash. And there will be more to come.

That’s where I am right now with my ongoing content audit of the Blog Marketing Academy blog. And honestly? Some of those posts were embarrassing. Old stuff from when I was doing more traditional blogging — short posts asking people to leave a comment, calls to action for programs that haven’t existed in years, articles that had no business still being indexed by Google in 2026.

I finally gave myself a serious upgrade on this project recently, and the speed difference is significant.

That’s what we’re digging into this week — what a content audit actually is, why your old content might be quietly hurting you, and how AI can make the whole thing a lot less of a slog.

Alright, let’s go. 👇

Your Old Content Could Be Quietly Hurting You

Here’s something most people don’t think about: every post on your site gets crawled by Google. The good ones AND the bad ones. The sharp, useful guides you published last year AND the thin little post from 2013 where you asked readers to “leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts!”

Ask me how I know. 🤣

Google doesn’t evaluate your pages in isolation. It forms an impression of your entire site. And if a significant chunk of your content is low-quality, outdated, or just… irrelevant to what you actually do now… that impression suffers.

That’s the core argument for doing a content audit. And it’s a project I’ve been at — off and on — for years now.

A Long Time Coming

This isn’t a new idea around here. Back in issues #223–228, I ran a whole series on doing a content audit, including the somewhat alarming revelation that I had deleted 35% of my blog posts at the time. That was a big deal then.

But the project never really ended. I picked it back up in issue #522, working through the older archives manually — pulling up posts, checking traffic, deciding what stays and what goes.

Here’s the current state of affairs: at one point, Blog Marketing Academy had around 1,500 blog posts. I now have 374 published. Currently, there are 112 sitting in the trash from my most recent push.

That’s not a content audit. That’s a content reckoning. 😄

And I’m not done.

What Google Actually Thinks About Your Old Posts

Google’s quality signals aren’t just page-by-page. They’re site-wide.

When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s building a picture of your overall content quality. A few thin, low-value pages here and there probably won’t tank you. But if a significant portion of your archive is outdated, off-topic, or just plain weak — that affects how Google evaluates everything else on your site too.

There’s also the crawl budget to consider. Google doesn’t crawl every page of your site on every visit. It has a budget for how much time it spends crawling any given site. If you’ve got hundreds of low-value pages eating up that budget, your better content may get crawled less frequently — meaning slower indexing of new content and updates.

Google introduced the concept of “helpful content” a few years back as an explicit quality signal — and it operates at the site level, not just the page level. Sites producing genuinely useful content for real people get rewarded. Sites with a lot of thin, low-quality, or unhelpful content get penalized across the board — even the good pages.

The practical takeaway: having less content, but better content, is a real SEO strategy. Not just a tidy-up exercise.

What a Content Audit Actually Is

A content audit is a systematic review of your entire blog archive — going back through every post and making a triage decision. The goal isn’t to produce new content. It’s to bring your existing content up to your current standards, and get rid of what doesn’t belong anymore.

Every post gets one of three verdicts:

Rewrite — The topic is still evergreen and on-brand, but the post needs a real overhaul. Updated examples, current tools, fresh voice, proper CTA.

Freshen — The post is largely solid, just needs lighter work. Fix broken links, swap out dated references, add a CTA, clean up the SEO.

Trash — The post no longer serves the site. Delete it — and set up a 301 redirect to a relevant page if it had any SEO value worth preserving.

Simple framework. But applying it across hundreds of posts takes time, which is exactly why most people never actually do it.

What the Archives Revealed

I do my audit in chronological order — oldest posts first. And I’ll just say it: some of what I found was genuinely embarrassing. 😳 Tool reviews for plugins that haven’t existed in a decade. Ten slightly different versions of the same “stop making excuses” mindset post. CTAs pointing to programs I shut down years ago. Short posts that were basically just “here’s a thought I had today” — tweets before Twitter existed.

The early years go fast because the verdict is obvious on almost everything. It’s the middle years — where the writing gets more developed — that require actual judgment.

It’s Not Just About SEO

For a long time, I operated under the assumption that more content was better. Bigger archive, more pages, more surface area for Google to find — that was the logic. And I treated all of it as equally valuable, just because it existed.

That thinking changes when your business changes.

Blog Marketing Academy today is not the same site it was in 2012. The audience is different. The offers are different. The positioning is completely different. And a lot of that old content doesn’t just fail to serve the current direction — some of it actively works against it. Old posts still getting a trickle of traffic but pointing people toward outdated programs, old framings, or offers that no longer exist. That’s not neutral. That’s a problem.

So a big part of this audit isn’t just about Google quality signals. It’s about strategic alignment. Every post on your site is either serving your current goals or it isn’t. “It still gets a little traffic” isn’t a good enough reason to keep something that’s pointing people in the wrong direction.

Which brings me to the reframe that made this whole project click for me: I don’t think of the BMA blog as a blog anymore. It’s a library.

A curated knowledgebase of guides and articles, all pointing people toward the right next step. A library gets maintained. Books that are outdated, wrong, or no longer relevant get pulled from the shelves. The ones that stay are there intentionally.

Most of us have been running our blogs like filing cabinets — just adding stuff chronologically and never going back. The content audit is how you convert a filing cabinet into a library. One where everything in it actually belongs there.

The SEO benefits follow naturally from that. Fewer, better pages tend to outperform a bloated archive with lots of dead weight. Google rewards consistency and quality across the whole site. And when you’re not burning crawl budget on junk, your good content gets more attention.

But even if Google didn’t exist? You’d still want to do this.

Going from 1,500 posts to 374 — and still counting — isn’t something that happened overnight. But the direction is clear, and the site is better for it.

In the next article below, though, let’s talk about how I supercharged how fast I can do this…

WordPress News & Updates

31 Plugins Closed After Backdoor Attack. This one is genuinely alarming. Someone bought a portfolio of 31 WordPress plugins on Flippa, quietly planted a backdoor in August 2025, waited eight months, then activated it — injecting hidden SEO spam visible only to Googlebot while site owners saw nothing wrong. WordPress.org closed all 31 plugins and forced an auto-update, but sites that were already compromised still need manual cleanup of wp-config.php. The bigger issue: WordPress.org has no mechanism to review plugin ownership transfers, and this was the second supply chain attack in two weeks exploiting that gap. If you manage client sites, read Austin Ginder’s full breakdown at Anchor Hosting and check your installs.

Contact Form 7 Entering Feature Freeze. CF7’s creator Takayuki Miyoshi confirmed at WordCamp Asia 2026 that version 6.2 will be the plugin’s final major update — after that, only bug fixes and security patches. No formal post yet, just a verbal confirmation at the event. I’ve never liked Contact Form 7, but it is used by millions of sites so that’s definitely big news. A plugin that’s stopped evolving alongside WordPress is a long-term compatibility risk worth planning around. If you’re looking to move, Fluent Forms is my go-to recommendation.

Matt Mullenweg: “The Wheels Have Fallen Off.” In a wide-ranging post in WordPress Slack, Mullenweg declared the project had spent years doing damage to itself, called the release culture “boring or mediocre crap,” and pointed to a hidden backlog of 8,000+ open Trac tickets. Reaction in the community was mixed — many agreed with the substance, fewer with the delivery. If you want the full picture, The Repository has the complete story.

WordPress 7.0 Pre-Releases Paused. Development on WordPress 7.0 hit an unexpected delay, with pre-releases paused and a new release schedule due by April 22. The versioning question has been resolved but the timeline is still being sorted out. Full details at The Repository.

WooCommerce 10.7 Released. The headline change is a 51% reduction in database queries on the orders REST API — down from 271 to 132 per request. If your WooCommerce order management screen has felt sluggish, this is why, and this update addresses it directly. Also includes checkout performance improvements and better analytics export filters. Full release notes at woocommerce.com.

WooCommerce Data: 32% of Stores Are Gone. An updated study of 15,000 WooCommerce stores found 32% are no longer reachable — 404s, errors, or stuck in maintenance mode. Of the survivors, 14% have migrated away, mostly to Shopify. Block cart adoption sits at just 12% overall. The takeaway isn’t that WooCommerce is dying — it’s that store owners aren’t anti-block, they’re pro-stability. Nothing kills a conversion rate experiment faster than a checkout that was already working. Full report at Studio Wombat.

Ninja Forms File Upload — Critical Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation. A critical file upload vulnerability in the Ninja Forms File Upload plugin has been actively exploited since April 6. If you’re running this plugin, update to version 3.3.27 immediately. Details at Wordfence.

ACF Pro 6.8 — AI Can Now Work With Your Custom Fields. A significant update for ACF Pro users. Version 6.8 adds WordPress Abilities API integration, meaning AI tools can now directly interact with your custom fields, post types, and taxonomies in a standardized, secure way. Also adds automatic Schema.org structured data generation from your custom fields — useful for AI search visibility — plus new WP-CLI commands for managing ACF JSON. Full release notes at advancedcustomfields.com.

FluentCRM 3.0 RC1 Available. The release candidate for FluentCRM 3.0 is out, and this is a big one — a complete rebuild on Vue 3 with a Gutenberg-native email builder, SMS marketing including two-way conversations, a redesigned dashboard, dark mode, AI writing support, and email sending speeds up to 5x faster. If you’re a FluentCRM user, keep an eye on the beta page at fluentcrm.com and consider testing it before the full release lands.

FluentAffiliate v1.4.0 — Recurring Commissions Now Supported. A notable update for anyone running an affiliate program. v1.4.0 adds recurring commission support, meaning affiliates can now earn on subscription renewals — not just the first sale. Also adds SliceWP migration support and social sharing improvements. Full release notes at fluentaffiliate.com.

FluentCart Q1 2026 — 1,500 Commits Shipped. The FluentCart team published their Q1 roundup and it’s substantial. Highlights include a complete overhaul of bulk product management, multi-country shipping zones grouped by continent, a Visual Email Template Builder, and a new Visual PDF Invoice Customizer. Eight roadmap items delivered on schedule, with extras from community feedback on top. WooCommerce alternative is looking more solid every quarter — full Q1 roundup at fluentcart.com.

How I Use An AI Copilot To Supercharge My Content Audit

Obviously, depending on the size of your archive, a content audit can take a really long time to do it all manually. While I haven’t been at it consistently the entire time, this has been a project on my agenda for multiple years now. It was slow, manual work. Pull up a post. Read it. Check the traffic. Make a decision. Move on. Repeat a few hundred more times. 😳

That’s still essentially what I’m doing. But now I have a copilot. And it changes everything.

The Setup

I’m using Claude Code — Anthropic’s AI tool designed for working directly with code and files, which you can run from a desktop app without needing to touch a command line. The key to making this work well for a content audit is giving it direct access to your WordPress site.

Here’s what that means in plain English…

Most web hosting gives you something called SSH access — essentially a secure, direct connection between your computer and your web server. Think of it as a back door into your site that bypasses the WordPress dashboard entirely. When you connect via SSH, you can interact directly with your server and your files.

Once you have SSH access, you automatically get access to something called WP-CLI — and this is the part most WordPress users don’t even know exists. WP-CLI is a command-line interface built right into WordPress. It lets you do almost anything you can do in the WordPress dashboard, but faster, more powerfully, and without a browser. Query the database. Move posts to trash. Create redirects. Publish drafts. All from the command line.

When Claude Code connects to your site via SSH, it gets full WP-CLI access automatically. And that means it can execute actions directly — no copy-pasting, no tab switching, no wrestling with the limitations of MCP connectors.

What the Copilot Workflow Actually Looks Like

Before we started working together on the audit, I spent some time getting Claude up to speed. I described my CTAs — what they are, where they link, and when I’d use each one. I explained my typical reader. I walked through the triage framework: Rewrite, Freshen, or Trash.

All of this was committed to memory (which Claude stores as markdown files). This way, I don’t have to keep re-specifying things. It knows.

Now when I sit down to work, I open a session and we just… get into it. Claude pulls up posts in batches and adds them to the task list. Then, we plow through each article one at a time. I pull up a post, Claude can see it directly, and we evaluate it together. It’ll often make a recommendation on what to do — and I make the final call. If I say trash it, Claude moves it to trash and sets up the 301 redirect. If I say freshen it, we work through the updates together right there in the chat.

That back-and-forth is what makes it feel like a genuine copilot rather than just a tool. I’m still the one making every decision. But I’m not doing the legwork alone.

The edits can be committed directly by Claude. If the excerpt on the post was nonexistent, I have Claude write a new one. If the post is missing a feature image, I have Claude generate an image prompt for me and then I go plug that into Google Gemini to generate my image.

The Salvage Play

One of my favorite parts of this workflow is what happens when a post is worth trashing, but contains something salvageable.

Maybe the core idea is still good, but the post is too old, too short, or too tangled up in outdated framing to be worth updating. In that case, I’ll have Claude extract the useful material and draft an entirely new article from it — written in my current voice, with a proper CTA, ready for me to review. It then places that draft directly into WordPress.

So instead of just deleting the post and losing whatever value was in it, I end up with a new draft I can edit and eventually publish. That’s a workflow I simply couldn’t do at any real speed without AI.

What This Means If You’re Not a Techie

Getting Claude Code connected to your site via SSH takes some technical comfort — it’s not something most solopreneurs will set up themselves. But AI can still help you think through triage decisions, draft rewrites, and write new articles from salvaged material even without direct WordPress access. You’d just be doing the copy-pasting yourself rather than having it execute directly.

If you’re a Concierge client hosted on Concierge Cloud, I already have full SSH and WP-CLI access to your site. That means I can generate a content inventory report for you — post counts, age breakdown, and a bird’s-eye view of what’s in your archives — to give you a serious head start before you ever sit down to do the work yourself. And if you want to set this up on your own machine, that’s something I can help with too.

The Bottom Line

This content audit has been an ongoing project for years. I dedicate a little time to it each week — it’s not something you blast through in a weekend. But with AI as a copilot, each session covers dramatically more ground than it used to.

112 posts in the trash. 374 still published. And a site that gets a little more intentional every week. 🗑️