The Life Changing Magic of Deleting Old Content: 11 Experts on Content Pruning and SEO
Andy Crestodina
Co-Founder and CMO at Orbit Media | SEO, Analytics, AI, Content Strategy and Website Optimization
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Your blog is an attic. It’s an old storage unit, filled with dozens of articles that no one’s touched in ages. Cluttered and dusty, it’s time to clean house.
Or is it?
I had this debate with Amanda Gant, our Marketing Director. Amanda is a tidy person who knows everything about content marketing and Analytics, so I always take her advice. But this topic triggered a feisty debate.
The other day, she tells me she’s auditing all of our content cleaning out some old, useless pages. The plan was to delete the blog posts with no traffic and no links. Then redirect that URL to the most similar page.
My response was, why bother?
After our short debate, she (cleverly)?moved the conversation to LinkedIn?to get input from some top content pros and SEOs. We quickly discovered that a?lot of people have a lot of advice about pruning content. Some shared experience and examples of results.
What would Marie Kondo do if she was a content strategist?
This post will try to answer that question. We’ll explain the when, why and how to prune content for SEO. You’ll find the views of the experts shared throughout and at the end, I’ll add my contrarian view.
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Why prune old content?
People prune pages for several reasons. Ask an expert and you’ll hear things like “reduce bloat” and “maximize link equity.” But what are the benefits of pruning? What’s the impact on results?
Here’s why they say you should delete old, non-performing pages:
That’s basically the idea.
Note: In this case, pruning content is not about streamlining navigation, consolidating categories or improving design. We’re not talking about UX because there is no debate on that topic. Always do anything that improves the experience of visitors!
Does the old content spark joy?
It’s reckless to delete a URL (or even change a URL) without checking a few things first. Ask these two questions to help you decide if that page sparks any digital joy:
SEO Specialist, Content writer & AI aficionado
2 年Hey Andy Crestodina ! What a great topic, and quite controversial also (in some scenarios ??). Was wondering if you have any kind of opinion if this same theory would apply to blogs focused on news articles, which account mostly for outdated posts with some of them going as far back as almost a decade. These websites get easily on the 10k+ URLs range.. curious to hear your take on it ????????
We believe it's important to keep the content up-to-date so that no one visits a page with inaccurate information or outdated prices. However, there is no need to delete old content, especially if it still makes perfect sense and is relevant today.
CEO @ Digital Elevator- Marketing for biotech companies
2 年Interesting perspectives from the interviewees highlight varying degrees of pruning effectiveness. Some sites saw nothing whereas others saw significant gains. In my experience running enterprise content audits, we are always finding content to re-optimize, merge, or target with links. Often this means a lot of deleting and 301s with future content plans that seek to get the old content back up to speed. We are never approaching, or selling, content audits with the intent of just pruning and 301ing. It's always about the merger of quantitative (links, traffic, ranking) data with qualitative data (is this low-volume page actually a good resource for sales?) and then making recommendations based on that. Then, it's triaging the content optimizations that will have the most business impact based on conversations with the client. Great discussion starter Andy Crestodina!
B2B SaaS Marketing & Branding
2 年Joost Jansen Valerija Agromova
Marketing Communications | Healthcare Marketing Copywriter | Multichannel & Omnichannel Content | B2C/D2C/B2B
2 年Great insights here...those which I have read. (Full Disclosure: I have not read through each comment, but have skimmed them all). My take: Well, in my experience I find it best to keep content that is evergreen (duh) and update it without destroying what made/makes it relevant and traffic-driving. Consider what "60 Minutes" does with their content. They revisit an old feature, but add updates so that it sounds like it's new. Then, after delivering the content with a new introduction (with a 'back in December we visited the...blah blah blah), and then they show the original video. Taking a cue from this, I update verbs within a previously published content (if the verbs are time-specific, I change them to past tense), and change the publishing date. (* I try to be transparent and include a footnote that the article has been updated). I tweak the headline/title to make it stronger for SEO and add topical, new content by pulling in new data and/or link to new and/or updated webpages on my website. I also update the header image, and more in-content images, update the CTA and then share the post on all social media as if it were brand new! It Works!