Don't Delete Your Post (Or Page), To Rebuild It

Many people have a yearly ritual, called "spring cleaning", where the entire house gets a complete cleaning, from top to bottom. When one does spring cleaning, one does not tear the house down, however - one only cleans what is there.

Some blog owners seem to think that "spring cleaning" of a post starts with tearing the post down, as in deleting it and starting anew. We get an occasional query, from a perplexed blog owner, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?.

I rewrote a bunch of posts, and now all of the URLs have weird numbers at the end. How do I clean up the URLs?

and the only way to clean up the URLs is to start over, and re publish the original posts, with the non suffixed URLs.

When you delete a post (page) from your blog, all that you do is remove the post (page) from visibility. The post (page) is removed from

• The Posts (Pages) list.
• The published blog.

The post (page) is not removed from

• The blog feed.
• The blog post (page) database.

If you delete a post, then re publish a new post with that same title, during the same month as it was originally published, you have two posts with potentially the same URL. To prevent that happening, Blogger adds a suffix onto the re published post.

Pages are subject to the same duplication prevention, with one difference. You can have the same post URL, in two different months - but a page URL is unique for eternity.

I published a post "Don't Delete Your Post, To Rebuild It" this month.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2012/06/dont-delete-your-post-to-rebuild-it.html

I can publish a second post "Don't Delete Your Post, To Rebuild It" next month.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2012/07/dont-delete-your-post-to-rebuild-it.html

But I can only publish one page, for eternity.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/p/dont-delete-your-post-to-rebuild-it.html

If you don't want a post (page) with a suffixed URL, you must start over.

1. Hope that the blog is public, and the post has been indexed by a search engine.
2. Un delete the original post, using the BlogID and PostID.

Finally, you have to do what you should have done, in the beginning.

1. Clean out the original post, from the inside.
2. Re publish the original post.

That is the only way to do "spring cleaning" on the posts, in your blog.

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