There is always a need to do a good job of SEO pruning, especially to eliminate unnecessary posts and content from portals with many pages. The same goes for blogs that often tend to chase news and discussions online. Result? Publications that don’t bring traffic, don’t rank, and have no value in terms of SEO. But they don’t make a difference to the user, the reader, either.
So there is a need for radical intervention, pruning yes extreme and no regrets. But with an eye to the basic logic — on-site SEO — that allows us to lighten without debasing.
What do we mean by SEO pruning of content?
We are within a metaphor dedicated to working on trees and plants, so by SEO pruning we mean exactly what it means for a gardener: always cut judiciously. A person who prunes a plant doesn’t just trim, he cuts everything if he needs to. Even with a hacksaw.
But never more than necessary. The SEO expert does the same on websites: he analyzes the design, reports everything on an Excel sheet and identifies pages that have little credence in the eyes of Google and the public. He then suggests the way forward to eliminate the problem. By the way, what is the knot to be solved?
For more: how Google search works
Why do you need to do SEO pruning of pages?
Actually SEO pruning must be done if you want the website to work in the best possible way without screwing itself over with its own hands. Many people think this route is related to the need to lighten the load on Google and optimize the crawl budget. That is, the resources that, based on the authority of the work done, the search engine grants to a website for crawling and indexing.
This is true for large projects, mammoth ecommerce and institutional portals, but a medium to small website or a corporate blog should deal with this problem mainly for a far more serious reason: SEO cannibalization of content on the website.
That is, publishing pages not only equal in content but also with the same search intent. This leads to paddling against the main goal: ranking in Google’s SERP.
You publish more, give vent to editorial desires and insert tags thinking you are giving the search engine new resources to rank for. Meanwhile you only create competitors to your own content.
How do you create pages that you later have to delete?
One of the most complex questions, there are a thousand ways to create content that seems super useful in the immediate moment but then becomes useless, obsolete, completely meaningless. So it’s only fair to bring some order to this house in which editorial work that does little traffic dwells.
Taxonomies
They are a source of duplicate content that Google tends to ignore up to a point. Then they become deleterious. For example, author pages on a blog: what good are they if there is a single signature on the blog?
Only to create a series of photocopy pages of the archive: use Yoast’s feature to eliminate these repetitions. The same goes for date archives and categories or tags that have few articles listed.
Blog tags are a source of duplicate content if you have decided that each blog article must have a minimum of 20 ever-changing tags. Read more in the article dedicated to SEO-optimized tags.
Search intent
That is, search intent, what people want when they type in a query. It used to be reasoned differently, specifically a search corresponded to a page. For example, I could create a publication for hotels in Rome and another for hotels in Rome and yet another for hotels and hotels in the capital of Italy. Today this is no longer the case: the evolution of the search engine takes us elsewhere.
There is an intent that covers several keywords, and I can rank for many searches if I work well with web copywriting and keyword research. Alternatively, SEO pruning of useless content that cannibalizes itself must come into play, curbing any push to rank on Google.
Obsolescence
Sometimes it happens, content gets old and no longer has a reason to exist. Or maybe they do but not in that form. There are articles that simply cannot be retrieved as is the case with special offers communicated on the blog or press releases. Because those publications are tied to a certain moment in history: past the interest of the audience they stop making traffic.
Other articles become old, even if the topic is always in vogue it is the content that is no longer valid. In these cases, a double-bladed editorial effort comes into play: on the one hand you cut back, on the other you update. Meanwhile, a calendar with editorial plan is outlined to avoid mistakes in the future.
Does all content that doesn’t drive traffic get deleted?
Halt, it is absolutely not that simple. What does not drive traffic does not have to be deleted as Joh Mueller also points out in this webinar. Why is it important to point out?
First, there may be posts or pages that do not receive as many visits but attract inbound links. So they feature valuable backlinks and woe betide you if you delete them. Of course, you could do a 301 redirect and it would still be worth the Pagerank switch, but why do that?
Better to update and keep the page alive with fresh information. The same goes for pages that have a structural function such as the about me section or contacts.
There may be pages that do not rank but do direct or referral traffic. That’s why before doing SEO pruning work on content, certain aspects need to be carefully evaluated.
How to proceed with website SEO pruning.
Let’s start with an assumption: pruning posts and pages is an SEO job that, in one way or another, becomes indispensable for all websites that tend to grow and structure. Only single-page sites and those composed of two or three institutional resources can exempt themselves from this pruning.
Already, SEO pruning work has the same evolutionary basis as the activities carried out with the Deming cycle. So it is a bit like that aimed at web performance: there is a need for constancy.
Website analysis
First you work on metrics and empirical observation. Then you have to identify pages that have few visits (usually less than 10 per year) in relation to impressions and poor rankings while also evaluating growth prospects. In summary, what is the work to be done?
One looks for pages that yield little while excluding those that must remain in any case. Such as, for example, those that are structural or have inbound links. Or even those that are crucial to the user.
Content pruning.
Central phase of the work. What is not needed must be eliminated so as not to create friction with the content you want to bring out. The rule of thumb is clear: If a page is not useful to the user, does not receive visits, has no potential rankings, or even inbound links, it can be eliminated.
Maybe you can leave it in 404 as it is for extreme cases. For example with editorial websites that publish hundreds of useless press releases. Of course, you have to remember to spot broken internal links with Screaming Frog and then correct them.
Then, in some cases, it may be useful to merge two or more pieces of content and create 301 redirects. Or you leave the pages but deindexing them with a noindex meta tag or pointing a canonical to the page that Google should take as a reference.