Websites that aren’t functioning as well as they could be could use some work on their content.
This can be accomplished by eliminating irrelevant information, such as old blog articles or sites that receive little to no traffic or conversions. If you want to know more about content pruning to optimize your page for search engines further, this article is for you.
What is “content pruning” in SEO?
In a broader sense, pruning is analogous to pruning a tree, in which you remove diseased or dead branches and leaves to improve the tree’s overall health and direct the tree’s growth to where you want it to go.
Importance of content pruning in SEO
The following are reasons why content pruning is important in SEO:
Maintain parity with Google’s ever-changing algorithm.
Suppose you want to increase the quality and authority of the material on your website. In that case, one effective strategy is to prune your content and remove or update any older pieces that don’t comply with Google’s quality requirements.
Poor, scraped material or black hat practices you may have once utilized may go unnoticed by you. Still, Google won’t ignore them and could impair your site’s visibility if you don’t perform the pruning procedure.
Updates to Google’s algorithm emphasize information quality, accuracy, and authority.
Concurrently, their algorithms for determining rankings are getting smarter about what constitutes high-quality material. The days of successfully ranking for keywords with scraped, keyword-stuffed material are over.
Identify out-of-date material
Content decay is the gradual loss of usefulness or accuracy of previously published materials.
Reviewing potentially outdated content like this regularly is an important part of content pruning because it allows you to keep your website up-to-date and full of accurate information by making the necessary changes (such as updating the page, redirecting it to a more relevant page on your site, noindexing it to keep crawlers away, or deleting it entirely and presenting a 404 error).
Better achieve your brand strategy
Each piece of content produced on your site should contribute to your overall brand strategy. Links, conversions, inquiries, traffic, and brand exposure are all possible outcomes of writing and publishing articles or landing pages.
There is a good risk that, as time goes on, not all of your pages on a site with a lot of material will be suitable for their intended purpose, or some of your pages won’t even serve any purpose.
Content pruning involves identifying, fixing, removing, noindexing, or redirecting outdated or irrelevant content to more relevant, optimized material. The page has a chance to be refreshed, optimized, and promoted once more.
A page with too little information is another example. Current material can be improved by linking to a comparable page. Paying attention to the content’s intended function can pay off in spades.
Identity competitor brands
When numerous pages on a website compete with one another for the same keyword or keywords, this is known as content cannibalization. It’s usually unintentional and unreported, but it can seriously hurt the rankings of every competing page. Internal competition is common in large companies and organizations and on websites with large brands and content libraries.
If you’re experiencing content cannibalization, content pruning can help you identify the problem and devise a strategy to fix it. To create a larger, more effective, and more valuable page, you can, for instance, choose to integrate two pages on one URL with better visibility.
Help Google crawl your page better
If your website is too bloated, it will hurt your efforts to climb the search engine results pages (SERPs). You’ll simplify for Google’s spiders to index your site by eliminating unnecessary material. Hence, when you eliminate the extraneous material, Google can more efficiently crawl your site and index more of its content.
Have a better experience overall
Pruning helps you feel good about everything on your site, not just what you’re adding right now. It decreases the possibility that users will stumble into humiliating, out-of-date content or information you no longer support.
What does Google say about content pruning?
If you don't want to keep it, then delete it :).
— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) May 13, 2019
FWIW sometimes good, old stuff becomes interesting again over time, so you might want to avoid just blindly deleting everything over a certain age.
How to prune your content for your website
The following shows the process of content pruning for SEO:
1. Do an inventory of your current content
Do not leave out the accompanying visuals, audio, or PDFs.
Add information gathered from your content management system’s export, your web analytics software, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs. Expect a high rate of duplicates; remove them using a filter.
You can use WP All Export plugin if you are using a WordPress plugin to get the data of your content:
Here is an example of content audit I did using WP All Export. I’ve picked the Permalink, Title, Date, Post Modified Date, and use VLookups to extract Google analytics, search console, backlinks.
2. Know what you are going to audit
Check the Google index to see which pages already exist and which ones need to be pruned. Evergreen content is content that is relevant and useful even after a long period has passed. Hence it should be preserved.
It might, however, be revised to include the most recent research findings, illustrative cases, and helpful hints. However, other older postings may drag down your site’s ranking and quality content standards.
3. Find your pages that aren’t performing well
Knowing which pages are slowing down your site is crucial, whether because they’re receiving few clicks or are irrelevant to your site’s purpose. Once you have a firm grasp on the layout of your site and the content that is still bringing in traffic, you can begin to identify the low-performing pages. Examine all of the site’s content with an eye toward editorial discretion.
4. Acquire information on visitor flow and inbound links
No content that hasn’t been viewed or clicked on in the past year or two should be kept. Don’t guess which pages aren’t working well; conduct thorough research of your site’s traffic and inbound links. Use analytics data from sources like Google Search Console and Google Analytics or a tool you’ve developed yourself.
5. Decide to enhance, delete, or hide Post
You can now take action, as you know the harmful posts.
Enhance content
Polish up that old content that you once thought was brilliant but have since forgotten about. Now is the moment to revise and enhance it, incorporate any new information or insights into the issue, or enhance it with useful examples, pictures, or a video. Also, make sure to link to it from inside the relevant articles.
Delete content
This includes posts or pages on themes for which you’ve written more in-depth and up-to-date information and old announcements. Before discarding an item, it’s a good idea to examine it for any potential hidden treasures.
Before getting too excited about cutting, consider merging those into the chosen article. And if you delete something, please update the URL to a more suitable replacement. If not, your readers will be met with a 404 error, which is both frustrating and upsetting for them.
Hide content
An example of content you would like to hide is a landing page written for a specific group of people but potentially outranking a more generic post on the same topic in search results. It serves a purpose, and you want to preserve it so you can send a subset of your readers there.
Alternatively, a yearly reoccurring sales post. It’s possible that you’d like to keep search engines from seeing this content so as not to confuse them. Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO will apply a noindex tag to the page if you choose noindex in the exercise, making it invisible to search engines.
Conclusion
Website quality can be increased through content reduction. Pruning a website can help you become more aware of the value each page delivers and adjust your metrics accordingly, keeping your site from becoming too large and bloated with low-quality content or repetition.
Since Google is giving more weight to content quality and authority, reviewing your existing material and making sure it is distinct, useful, helpful, and reliable will surely help.
