Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?

[MattRoney]

Happy Friday, everyone! This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore.

Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?

[Xtend-Life]

I think it's better to add more valuable content rather than removing content which you feel is under-performing. Unless its wickedly harmful then you should just leave it and move onto making better stuff.

[EGOL]

If you are slapped with a Panda problem, you better either be pruning or noindexing.  I really don't care to disagree with the advice given by some prominent Googlers, but if you got the poison on your site I think that you are better off pruning than allowing it to be consumed by their crawlers a thousand times every month.

[ronell-smith]

Matt,

I totally agree.

In my former life (er, job) I wrote thousands of ecomm product description for some of the world's biggest brands. It was a painful process at first, in large part because EVERY company felt that more was always better. Until I was able to show them that it wasn't.

At first, each description was bloated with text.

Then, I imposed a strict word (50) and character count (220) for descriptions, and conversions improved dramatically. Also, customer service calls and complaints diminished considerably.

Here's why: Customers visiting a specific product are more likely to know something about it, so they don't need a bunch of details. They ask friends and family members, read reviews, etc., so they're educated to a degree when they visit the page. Also, if they do have questions, it's better to have a Q&A-style setup on the page, similar to what REI does.

For folks who aren't as educated but who have landed on the page for a specific product, the diminutive descriptions means they have enough info to whet their appetites (i.e., to read reviews and conduct research) but not so much to confuse them.

RS

[Everett]

I don't think there is a one-size-fits all recommendation to make here, which is why that post has so much detail about how to do the research necessary to determine what the best route is for your business.

I agree that improving content is better than simply noindexing it, but I also think noindexing it is better than leaving it up long-term unimproved. And the reality is many businesses with tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of product pages, and most blogs with thousands of posts, aren't going to be able to economically scale rewriting all of it. The best solution for them, in my opinion, is to get rid of the pages that are dragging them down - at least get them out of the index.

They can always be reintroduced once they're improved.