Google Experts Explains How To Remove Old Content For Improved SEO
SEO expert, John Muller from Google has give his insights on how to remove old pages or content to improve the SEO. He has also discussed how most of the publishers make mistake in removing their older content to make SEO better.
He says removing old content means removing the “dead weight” so that Google will focus on the pages that really matter to you and your users.
Muller said before removing or deciding to remove any page is depends on first checking why the page is not performing well.
He said, “It’s something that I know some sites do.I think it is not a totally unreasonable approach to say that the pages that nobody cares about I essentially removed from my website.But it’s something where I wouldn’t just blindly do this.” He added, “So if you’re just blindly focusing on the number of impressions that you have for individual products and you drop them from search then it’s very easy to drop things that are actually useful but they’re just not that common.”
Removing the page depends on why the page is not receiving any traffic and what are the hindrances to make it perform well. This may be due people are not searching for that page or keyword.
However, these pages may contain instructions that people only search when they get some problem. So completely removing them is also not a solution, as these problems do not occur everyday.
You may be thinking that improving the content or page quality make sense, So Muller answers that it is best in most of the cases that improving the page or content by making it more informative and increasing readability can improve the site ranking. However, there are some pages that don’t make sense and decrease the ranking quality of other pages, so it’s better to remove them.
So What Is the Right Method To Remove Non-performing Content To Improve SEO
Basically just removing the content is not the best solution that fits your improving the SEO strategy. Removing content does not help in improving the site ranking automatically.
It is also important to look after whether the page needs some improvement to be done or not.
Just removing the content is the old strategy to solve the traffic issues. Instead there is best SEO solution that is used to remove content known as Content Cannibalization.
In this strategy, the content of similar kind should be removed as it does not help in improving the ranking.
And for those who have unique content and do not receive much traffic it is better to improve them by keyword research and making the content more informative.
So to improve your SEO strategy, invest your more time in analyzing the pages and content that they are not performing well. Give these pages a lot of time in upgrading and combining or removing the similar pages or content.
