Deleting or editing blog posts

Somewhere along my searching the web I got the strong impression others think it a bad idea to ever edit or delete a blog post, regardless how crappy or irrelevant it is. Here are two quick examples. Rewriting blog history: Bad idea, and Advice: Never delete a blog post. A more balanced view is expressed by Dave Taylor in Should you ever edit or delete blog entries? There are others in a similar vein.

I take a contrarian view of the situation. Elimination is an essential part of every healthy living process, on a micro level.  On a larger system level, everything is recycled and ultimately incorporated somewhere else if it has persistent value, or it is transformed.

Some think of the internet as a historical record, but that is not the way I view it.

Google maintains a site-wide keyword ranking as well as a page-specific keyword rank. I know this is true because Google Webmaster Tools reports these numbers and shows them to me in a graph. Although it is not clear to me how Google uses these site-wide keyword ranking, I know I'm not alone in my ignorance. But sometimes an extraneous series of posts may skew Google site-wide view of my web sites in a keyword direction I don't like. Eliminating the non-focused posts altogether may be the quickest solution to improve search performance, in my opinion.

But, I feel strongly about it. Especially when the abundance of my own verbosity on subject no longer of any interest to me are involved, and when they distort how search engines view the subject matter of my own blogs.  I have also written about it here.