Content pruning
Content pruning brings order back to a website that has grown for years. Weak pages are updated, merged or removed.
When content pruning pays off
Old news items, duplicate topic pages and outdated guides attract hardly any visits. Yet they still cost upkeep and crawl resources, and they dilute internal linking. Google judges content quality partly in the context of the whole site, so a smaller, well-kept site often performs better.
Identifying weak content
The assessment draws on several sources:
Clicks, impressions and positions from Google Search Console
Visits and conversions from web analytics
Backlinks and internal links per page
Accuracy and currency, judged by your editorial team
Low traffic alone is no reason to delete a page that matters to customers or sales.
Update, merge or remove
Update: The topic is relevant, the content is outdated.
Merge: Pages on the same topic are consolidated, the others redirected with a 301.
Remove: Without value or links, the page returns status 410 or redirects to a related topic.
Keep, but do not index: The page matters to users, not to search.
Every decision is documented per URL.
Measuring the impact
Visibility, clicks and crawl statistics are tracked across the whole site for several months. Fluctuations in the first weeks are normal.
Approach
The work starts with an inventory of all URLs and their metrics. On large sites, scripts merge the data automatically. Together with your editorial team, we decide on each group and implement the redirects in the CMS. After that, the content is reviewed on a fixed schedule.