Question about pruning your website/blog for SEO

[Dynata_panel_marketing]

Hey all,

So I checked out "The What, Why, and How of Pruning Your Website for SEO" and recently read ahrefs well known article on seo strategy and both really focused on the idea of removing poorly performing pages on your site for an SEO boost.

I've asked this question in a few different ways before but I was hoping to get some more insight into this.

If my company's blog has thousands of posts going back 5 years, 99% of which only really had pageviews on the day of their release and then after that receive no traffic, direct or organic, am I better off getting rid of (301) 99% of these posts and only sticking to/improving important/performant posts?

Does anyone know how other blogs/sites deal with these sorts of issues. Where one function of the blog is to provide informative articles and the other function to post little tidbits (with barely any copy and rapid relevancy decay rate) meant to promote interaction with the blog community (like polls or one line contest winner announcements).

Is this an issue of misusing the blog? For example, should the blog just be used for articles and all contests etc. be moved to social media?

Thanks in advance for your insights,

Roman

[94501]

Hi Roman,

Good question. I've dealt with this issue quite a bit. I think one element worth considering is the quality of the posts and what stood between them and organic success. I've found that pages on our site often didn't succeed for reasons that were in fact fixable. So, before declaring search success bankruptcy on them, I've tried to breathe new life into them... if the content warranted it. This could be adding content, refocusing on a different keyword, improving the link profile of the page or the on page elements. In any case, making good content isn't easy, so best to not lose some that could have worked.

Having said that, I've 301'd one helluva steaming truckload of old/failed pages and had good success, as well as a warm satisfied feeling afterwards. Best of luck!

Mike

[katemorris]

Many sites end up pruning content when a site refresh is hit. If a post has no organic traffic, no traffic at all, didn't link to anything, didn't get linked to and has no social shares, there should be no reason to keep it around. If it has any of that in the last 12 months, I'd keep it up.

This is one of those topics that you have to be careful with though. Don't go overboard and don't do it expecting a major rise in organic traffic. This is more of a housekeeping item. And as with most housekeeping items like fixing internal redirects, external redirects, etc, it can all combine to help with search performance.

As Mike alluded to and I've done with clients in the past, I'd take the candidates for removal, pull a list of their titles and review to see if they can be updated. Use the topic again. It's a good way to supplement your content calendar.