Why pruning content makes your site grow faster #

TLDR #

Plants benefit from pruning every once in a while. Correct pruning improves health, appearance and encourages growth. Websites are similar; pruning your site tree improves performance, user experience and traffic. Despite this, pruning is an oft-overlooked aspect of a successful content strategy.

Why remove content? #

The easiest way to ensure your visitors find relevant information is by making it visible. All other content is background noise. That noise makes it harder to find information, like a tree blocking sunlight from reaching its lower limbs.

A search engine’s purpose is to help people find information. To do so, their ranking algorithms prioritise websites with high signal-to-noise ratios. Low-quality affects search rankings in three main ways:

  1. It lowers your overall authority, causing even quality pages to rank lower.
  2. If you have thousands of low-quality pages, they may consume your crawl budget
  3. On a 'YMYL[1]' site, low-quality content can lead to penalisation.

The results can be striking. Search Engine Journal increased traffic by 60% and after excising low-quality content. Not to mention, you could enjoy reduced infrastructure costs, content management effort and even environmental footprint[2].

What is low-quality content? #

According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, any inaccurate or meaningless information is low-quality content. Content that doesn’t reflect your current brand positioning, help a visitor achieve a goal or fulfil some legal requirement should also be considered low-quality.

As living documents, websites naturally grow over time. On a large or long-lived website, it’s not uncommon to have tens, if not hundreds of pages of low-quality content[3].

These might include:

Not all old pages are low-quality. News, case studies or pages with historical significance are often worth keeping. The key factor is whether it is a page that someone would miss if it was gone.

How to remove low-quality content #

Low-quality content rarely builds up without other problems coming along for the ride. It tends to be a sign that you need a full content audit and strategy update. Before committing days (or weeks) to that, however, you can take care of the low hanging fruit.

Step 1: Find your content #

The first step is to locate problem content. Use whatever tools you have at hand to look for signals of poor-quality. Compare twelve-month stats year on year, looking out for:

Decreased numbers suggest that content has decreased in relevance. Consistently low numbers indicate the content was no good to start. Take the Pareto principle into account: the worst 20% of your pages probably account for 80% of the issues.

Step 2: Triage #

From your shortlist, identify the low-quality pages by asking:

Using your answers and the data you collected earlier, triage your content into three buckets: to update, to consolidate and to remove.

Step 3: Prune #

Ignore content in the ‘update’ bucket. We’re looking for the quick wins and rewriting pages won’t be quick. Instead, focus on transferring content from the ‘consolidate’ bucket, noting where pages move from and to.

Before removing pages, you should identify which should be redirected. A 301 Permanent Redirect will automatically push visitors to the new page and passes on the original’s SEO value if any. All consolidated pages should redirect to their new location. Pages to remove can also be redirected if there is a similar, better page to replace it.

Otherwise, removed pages should serve up a ‘410 Gone’ status. This tells the visitor (and any crawlers) that the page on-longer exists and it isn’t coming back.

Failing to serve the right status code will result in a ‘404 Not Found’ status when you delete the pages. A 404 response doesn’t indicate if a page was deliberately moved, or if it will return, so it’s not as helpful to visitors or crawlers. Good error messages are good UX, so correct status codes are important.

If there’s no suitable page to redirect visitors to, a “410 Deleted” status will let visitor and crawlers know the page was deleted intentionally.

With the right status codes set, it’s safe to unpublish, archive or delete the pages. Pages won’t disappear from search engines until they next crawled your site though. If this is an issue, you can use Google and Bing’s respective content removal tools.

Making it business as usual #

Old content builds up when editors forget the tail-end of the content lifecycle. To prevent that, enact a content maintenance and decommissioning process. This ensures the best experience for visitors and optimum search engine ranking.

Recap #

  1. Any content that could impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability or safety qualifies as ‘Your Money or Your Life’ content and is handled much more strictly. Find out more in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. ↩︎

  2. Web pages produce more carbon than you think. ↩︎

  3. One project early in my career had well over 100 such pages, mostly from old customer data collection efforts. Irritatingly, the company ignored the issue for years. Right up until GDPR… ↩︎