When trying to increase your organic web traffic, it can be easy to simply focus on turning out as much content as possible. But while your marketing teams might be focused on greeting new, relevant topics for your audience, what happens to your older web pages?
While it might seem that older pages may not have the same value as new content, the fact is, any web page you create has the potential to add increased value to your site over time. With the right “content pruning” strategy in place, you can turn older, outdated content into highly relevant pages that continue to generate more web traffic.
What Is Content Pruning?
Content pruning is the process of going through all of your historical web pages to see which are performing well from an SEO standpoint and which have fallen behind. This systematic review enables you to identify ways to revamp outdated or underperforming content, ensuring it remains relevant to your audience and ranks higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Why It’s a Strategic SEO Practice
Content pruning can be a highly effective strategy for helping you to leverage the time and resources you’ve already put into your content marketing initiatives. Instead of just waiting for page traffic to slowly die out over time, you can make smaller adjustments to the content’s structure to bring your site more authority and credibility.
In addition, by removing pages that are underperforming or were poorly written from the beginning, it helps to send better signals to search engine crawlers that “all” of your pages are worth receiving visitors.
The Three Main Approaches to Content Pruning
- Refreshing - This approach involves taking an existing page and making the information more relevant by adding new details, refreshing statistics, updating visuals, or adding a video.
- Consolidating - Merging multiple pages that cover the same topic can help to create a single, more comprehensive page reference for users. This helps create a stronger and more authoritative resource that’s easier for users to understand and helps improve search engine rankings.
- Removing - Sometimes, a page is simply too outdated or irrelevant to save. Removing it involves deleting the page and using a redirect to send any existing traffic and link value elsewhere.
Why Content Pruning Matters for SEO and Growth
Improving Search Rankings and Topical Authority
Taking the time to remove low-quality pages shows that you’re primary goal is to give your audience only the best site experiences. This sends a signal to Google that your website can be trusted to provide only the most relevant information to viewers.
Enhancing Crawl Budget Efficiency
Search engines aren’t able to crawl your website all the time. They have to maintain what’s referred to as a “crawl budget,” considering the massive amounts of websites they need to search through each day. Pruning out weaker content prevents crawlers from wasting time on content that would likely not be indexed or rank well due to its quality. This means they can then focus on your most important content and crawl it more frequently.
Boosting User Experience and Trust
A website that’s always current and easy for users to navigate through provides a much better experience for visitors. This ensures they’re able to find what they need without having to sift through outdated articles that don’t offer any real value. Taking this pruning approach ahead of time helps to lower page bounce rates and builds trust, which is great for your SEO and when building more trust.
Delivering Tangible ROI Through Better Lead Quality
Pruning helps you concentrate your SEO efforts on pages that attract qualified visitors. By cutting content that brings in low-quality traffic, you can improve your marketing's ROI by focusing on an audience that is more likely to become customers.
How to Identify Content That Needs Pruning
Key SEO and Business Metrics to Track
- Organic Traffic - In your Google Search Console (GSC), look for pages that have seen a steady decline in clicks and impressions over time. If a page hasn't received meaningful traffic in the past six months or more, it's a strong signal that it's no longer meeting a need or resonating with visitors.
- Conversions and Engagement Levels - Your Google Analytics data can also reveal pages with poor engagement signals, like a high bounce rate, low time on page, or no conversions. If a page isn't contributing to your business goals or holding user attention, it’s a strong candidate for pruning.
- Impressions vs. Clicks (CTR) - A page showing in your GSC that gets a lot of impressions but very few clicks probably has an issue with engagement. Its title or meta description might not be compelling enough to view it, or the content itself may not align with what users expect when they see it in search results.
- Backlink Profile Quality - Pages with few or no backlinks often carry less SEO weight. Before you delete a page, however, you should always check its backlink profile. If it has valuable links, you’ll want to redirect them to better content pages to preserve site authority rather than just deleting them altogether.
Effective Content Pruning Methods
Refresh Outdated Content
One of the best ways to improve SEO is to update an existing page. The first step to take here is to check for any outdated facts or statistics referenced from previous years and broken links, while replacing them with newer information. You should also re-evaluate your target keywords, since search intent can shift over time.
Consolidate Similar or Duplicate Content
Having multiple articles on nearly the same topic is a form of keyword cannibalization, which confuses search engines and can cause the site to appear like it’s using duplicate content. The solution to this problem is to merge these similar pieces into a single, comprehensive resource. Once you've created your new, consolidated page, be sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new one to pass along any existing link equity.
Remove Low-Value or Irrelevant Content
Some pages are better off being removed entirely. When content is outdated or no longer aligns with your business, it’s essential to ensure it’s not indexed. If the page has valuable backlinks or traffic, you can use a 301 redirect to direct it to a higher-quality page. For pages that have no value or suitable replacement content, a 410 (Gone) status code informs search engines that the page has been permanently removed.
Deindex Non-SEO Pages
Not every page on your site is meant for public consumption or search rankings—think internal team pages, thank-you pages, or temporary promotions. You can use a "noindex" tag on these pages. This tells search engines not to include them in their index, which helps conserve your crawl budget for the content you want to rank.
Technical Considerations Before Pruning
- Fixing Site Errors and Load Speed Issues - Before you start pruning, run a technical audit. Fix any existing issues like 404 errors or slow page load times. You want to make sure your pruning efforts aren’t unintentionally creating more errors on your site than there were in the first place.
- Redirect Mapping and Broken Link Prevention - Creating a redirect map is another important step to take. This ensures every page you remove is properly redirected, preventing users from hitting dead ends and preserving your SEO value.
- Preserving Internal Link Equity During Pruning - When you remove or redirect a page, you also need to update all internal links that pointed to it. This prevents broken links on your site, which is bad for user experience and disrupts the flow of link equity between your pages.
Common Content Pruning Mistakes to Avoid
Deleting Pages with Valuable Backlinks
One mistake you don’t want to make when starting to delete pages is not paying attention to your backlink profile. The links you’ve gained take time to acquire and can be highly valuable, so you want to make sure you’re not inadvertently eliminating them unless absolutely necessary.
Over-Relying on Word Count or Traffic Alone
Many times, site owners can become overly preoccupied with content word counts and assume that higher is always the way to go. However, it’s important not to let high word count pages or web traffic be the only metric you check when evaluating where and when you should prune pages.
Pruning Without Baseline Performance Data
Before you start making any changes to your site, your first goal should be to benchmark your current site metrics. Knowing how well or poorly pages perform before you make changes will give you a more accurate way to gauge whether the changes you make are actually improving your metrics. This helps you avoid making any major changes that can be harder to fix down the road.
Key Takeaways and Action Plan
Content pruning should be considered a vital part of any long-term SEO campaign you initiate. Not only does it help your rankings by eliminating outdated or irrelevant information from your site, but it also gives you the chance to rejuvenate pages that can continue to add value so long as they get a bit of optimization.
By regularly evaluating and refining your existing content, you can go a long way to strengthening your site’s authority while improving user experiences as you grow. To help ensure you take the appropriate content pruning steps for your site, here is an easy-to-follow 3-step action plan:
- Audit Content Quarterly - It’s important to set up a recurring process to audit your website's content every three months. This ensures you’ve given enough time for any changes you make to appear on SERPs and will help you to maintain a good routine for checking on the health of your site.
- Apply the Refresh/Consolidate/Remove Framework - For each piece of content you review, use this simple framework discussed earlier to make necessary changes. If you decide to keep any content:
- Refresh any outdated content or older statistics based on the most recent publishing data.
- Consolidate any similar web pages that cover the same topic and would be better suited as a single, comprehensive article.
- Remove any content that no longer serves a purpose and ensure proper redirects are created when applicable.
- Measure KPIs Over Time - Once you’ve made any changes to your site’s overall structure, be sure to track your SEO metrics over time. If you’re not seeing any positive changes after 3-6 months, it’s time to re-evaluate your strategies or consider reverting to the original state.