Last month I had a client crying on a Zoom call.
Not figuratively. Actual tears. I thought she was going to fire me on the spot.
I had just told her we needed to delete 847 blog posts. Four years of her work. Gone.
"But I wrote those at midnight while my husband kept asking when I was coming to bed. You can't just delete that."
I know. That's exactly why this is hard.
Here's what nobody talks about in those "SEO tips for 2026" threads:
Refreshing old content only works if the content deserved to exist in the first place.
My client had 12 articles about "first-time homebuyer tips." Twelve. Written over four years. Each one a little different. Each one a little hopeful. Each one cannib@lizing the others.
Google looked at her site and saw a hoarder. Someone who couldn't let go.
And now? Everyone's using AI to publish even faster. More content. More noise. More pages fighting each other for the same scraps of attention.
SEO isn't dead. But the old playbook — "just keep publishing" — is.
I've been there. I have a spreadsheet called "content-calendar-FINAL-v4-USE-THIS.xlsx" from 2019. Still can't delete it.
But here's what climbing taught me:
You don't reach the summit by carrying every piece of gear you've ever owned. You reach it by knowing what to leave at base camp.
So we did surgery.
We picked her one best article — the one with backlinks, the one with age, the one Google already half-trusted. The alpha.
Then we went through the other eleven. Took the good paragraphs. The specific stats. The examples that actually helped people. Stitched them into the alpha.
We didn't delete her work. We concentrated it.
The other URLs? 301 redirects. Every ounce of trust those old pages earned now flows to one place.
For ten days, her traffic dropped.
She emailed me every morning. "Is this normal?" "Should we undo it?" "My business partner thinks we should sue."
I drank a lot of tea.
Day eleven, the alpha page woke up. Started ranking for keywords she'd been chasing for three years. The long-tails. The questions. The stuff that actually converts.
210% more traffic. 40% less content.
She sent me a bottle of whiskey last week. Didn't apologize for the lawyer thing. I didn't ask her to.
Everyone's racing to make more with AI.
Maybe the real edge is knowing when to make less
