Once a week I hear from people who want to delete their old press releases on BigNews.biz. They want to know why there is no delete function on the site.

There are many old releases on the site that have links pointing to them from other sites on the Web and they are also indexed in the major search engines. If you check your weekly traffic reports on BigNews.biz, you’ll see that many of your old releases are still getting new readers. Once you delete your old releases, that traffic goes nowhere.

On BigNews, you have the ability to edit your old releases. So instead of deleting them, maybe add some text containing updates and a link to your latest releases. Keep the content intact, but at the top of the release, include a paragraph with an update. This allows you to drive traffic from your old release to your new release.

As an example on our sister site News-Antique.com, we often get press releases about an upcoming antiques & collectibles shows. The show promoters have a new show with new info and submit a new release each year. They write to me about deleting the old show info. I tell them their old release has great placement on Google and it looks like it is still getting lots of traffic. Instead of deleting it, post a new release witht he new info, then edit the old release with an update about this years show and link to the new release.

So don’t delete your old releases, use them to drive traffic to your new releases.