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The SEO Copilot
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    • Background
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  • Boost my GMB
  • Generate Content
    • Scheduling Content
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  • Content Pruning
    • Content Pruning
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  1. Content Pruning

Content Pruning

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Last updated 6 months ago

What is content pruning?

Content pruning describes the process of removing old, outdated, or irrelevant content from your website. If you have 1,000 pages and 90% (i.e. 900 pages) of them are not getting any traffic, your site does not look "helpful" to search engines.

Do I really have to prune content?

You do not strictly have to prune content. If you have a lot of pages that are not getting any traffic, it is recommended to prune them.

Pruning can also help you with your crawl budget. If you noindex pages that are not getting any traffic, search engines will not crawl them as much anymore. This means that search engines will crawl your important pages more often.

Scared? The changes can also be undone. Simply remove the noindex metatag after two months if you really do not see any effects. Your pages will appear in the search results again.

How did SEO Copilot identify pages that should be pruned?

We identified pages that exist for at least 6 months and have not gotten a single click in the last 6 months. You can either choose to noindex the pages or improve the content.

How do I prune content?

You can simply add the metatag noindex in the header of the pages you want to prune.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

You should see a noindex tag on your website then. Here, we are using the ahrefs chrome extension to check if the noindex tag is present.

What is the evidence that it really works?

We do not have access to the Google algorithm and we need to test continuously to find out what works. You can view content pruning from multiple angles.

A.) Is a website "good" if 95% of its pages get no clicks? Should the google bot crawl again and again pages that get no clicks OR should the bot crawl the pages that are already appearing on page 1? We believe that you should send google bot to the pages that matter (i.e. pages with clicks).

B.) We have seen it ourselves. We have pruned content for clients and we have seen a big increase in clicks. Also others have confirmed this finding.

C.) According to Google :

“having relatively high amounts of unhelpful content might cause other content on the site to perform less well in Search to a varying degree. Removing unhelpful content might contribute to your other pages performing better.”

At the end of the day, it is your call. You could run a test for 2 months and if there are no improvements, you remove the no-index tag again.