Question

Content trimming.  If you discovered over 100 blog posts on clients site that have received max 9 clicks (majority have received 0 clicks) in the past 6 months - would you get rid of them?Content trimming. If you discovered over 100 blog posts on clients site that have received max 9 clicks (majority have received 0 clicks) in the past 6 months - would you get rid of them? They're providing 0 value. I want to cut them all. What implications would I possibly face if I were to do so? Is it beneficial long term? Edit: a lot of the pages have extremely thin content. Couple of sentences and an image.  

Answer 1

Connect GA + GSC + ahrefs to Screaming Frog. Run Screaming Frog. Export data to Excel or Google Sheets. Perform content audit to determine which pages should be improved, which should be left as is, and which should be deleted and/or removed from the index. Followed the same process using our templates for a number of clients, all of which experienced rankings improvements as a result of the content pruning and further increases after the remaining pages were optimized further.  

Comments

The only links they have are in a HTML sitemap. Remove from that and 410?  

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@archeozoic I meant external links from sources other than the root domain. Those links (HTML sitemap) are just signposts Google can follow to find things more quickly and easily. After the page has been removed from the site, remove the link from the sitemap or re-generate a new sitemap. When you do, those links won't be there for Google to follow any longer.  

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@phenothiazine ah I got you. Thanks! Appreciate it.  

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Hey @phenothiazine, I've been doing this with a few sites lately. You mentioned you use templates with predefined formulas. Is that something you would be willing to share? Totally understand if not. Worth an ask!  

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@archeozoic Good question. I've sent the file to others in the past, but had to spend too much time training them how to use it. If there's enough interest, I'd be willing to put a training video together to help you and others use it, but I don't know if it's worth the time it will take unless there's more interest.  

Answer 2

Move the content to pages

Answer 3

I'd try to mix and match few decent posts from all these low quality pieces. Then again, these blog posts have page authority so it may make sense to add a bit of content and use them as part of onsite silos. or just trim them. More than one way to deal with them.  

Answer 4

I would probably use them to link internally to some of my more important pages to boost their authority.  

Answer 5

Reduce, remix and redirect —> After that remove the ruble

Answer 6

Update the pages with new content and add internal links with some external authority links too.  

Answer 7

Zero click is not "0 value". If those are good enough to be indexed, they can do a good job for internal linking, for example. Another perspective is "0 value" vs. "0 potential". Some may be somewhere, having an acceptable kw on page 3-4, which, with some content editing, new text and some support might rise quite easily.  

Comments

@kingfisher13887 a lot of them have an image and a couple of sentences. Some even just have an image. I'm definitely going to look at which ones can be optimised. A manual analysis is definitely needed before I start cutting any.  

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@archeozoic I get what you say, surely many may go away. But. you never know. I just placed a glosarry on a website - 1 paragraph of 1-2 sentences, no image, no meta description, no nothing, and I see like 10 of these "pages" so close to page 1 in SERP. you know, the night is dark and full of terrors :)

Answer 8

Hi, you need to consider a couple of things here. 1st did you use proper phases and words which is search by users in your blog post? 2nd target audiences and its worthy to give value to your users? 3rd what a specific terms of your given blog post? I mean to say did you solve something which is by different methods or guide or tutorial or more? 4th how long and format of your blog post? Is your post included resources to confirm your information and internal pages of your other blog posts and pages to give more information. Did you use images and videos? 5th are you updating your post on a monthly basis or not? There are a lot of things to consider when you're looking for visitors. Let me know if you have questions

Answer 9

"If you discovered over 100 blog posts on clients site that have received max 9 clicks (majority have received 0 clicks) in the past 6 months - would you get rid of them? " Nope. Not for that reason, at least.  

Comments

@narcotize what would you say needs to be considered? Page content? Value? Tbh, the majority of it is junk.  

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@archeozoic Going only by what is in your original post, I would say to myself, "Here are 100+ pages of existing content. Can they be improved? "

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@narcotize yeah, I agree with that. 100%. I need to go through them all!  

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@archeozoic With that many blog posts, you might want to tighten the site navigation. It could just be the PageRank-like value isn't flowing down to the older content.  

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@narcotize solid point. Thanks!  

Answer 10

As a copywriter, I say "Never Delete" if there's some value to be earned by editing/updating this content -- assuming it's not junk (junk = deletion). How about adding an "archive" link in the footer and posting it in that section? Unlikely to be discovered by someone browsing the site, but searchable via google if that's what they're looking for.  

Comments

@newsworthy good shout!  

Answer 11

I would fix them so that they are helpful before I deleted them.  

Comments

@antigone39497 what if they can't really be "fixed"? For example, it could be a page about a company announcement containing one line and an image.  

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@archeozoic Use your best judgment.  

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There's a story behind any announcement.  

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@archeozoic I would turn the page into a full resource that listed company announcements (so there is just one page of announcements) and link out to more in-depth Articles. Everything can be made better. In my experience, a url that has been indexed and changed completely ranks faster/better than a fresh url (assuming similar topic) so Use the stock to your advantage. (I am not a fan of redirects and think they are used entirely too much in situation of thin content).  

Answer 12

I’d split them into: 1) improve them. Look in gsc for opportunities to rank for something useful and related 2) use them. If there’s natural inbound linking to other articles, I’d do that. 3) if there really is no benefit to some, remove them Obviously check they don’t have inbound links.  

Answer 13

Of greater value is to find out why they haven't received any clicks. That's a lot of posts for so little value.  

Answer 14

I tested this this theory as an anti strategy about 2 years ago after the whole content is king and more content is queen theory became popular. Google had enough content and I knew they just wanted better quality. I had a client with 276 posts that only a handful were generating traffic. So I was prepared to get fired to test this and pruned 200 posts (mostly thin and promotional and useless posts) This was my process: First I set GSC to the last 18 months and looked for posts that had 0-10 clicks. I put those in a bucket of either get rid of or combine topics. For those topics that had no other relationship to other content and were dogs I downloaded for improvement later. Then redirect to main category of that topic. Then the posts that had similar content I used as donors and combined to Uber posts (call it whatever) silo hub and spokes etc. I then. Redirected the old post that was a donor to the new post. The pruned posts 410. My results as you can see was positive and this was without one single new piece of new content in year plus. The process is to backup what you are about to get rid of to be used for later or to bring back if the process doesn't work for that site. every site is different.  

Comments

@hora77577 amazing results! Seems like I'm facing the exact same dilemma.  

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Great results! I assume you deleted the content around 9/15/18?  

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@frugivorous thank you! Approximately I noted it within analytics.  

Answer 15

Yeah i'm on team "delete and redirect" based on what i've seen work well. also the majority of y'all are way more advance than i am but here are a few of my favorite seo content tips:  
https://marketingoveralls.com/lates...date/

Answer 16

A lot of misguided advice here. Truth is, people would need to see the pages and audit deeply to make a GOOD actionable recommendation. Everything else is speculation.  

Answer 17

If done right, it helps you out a lot. Recently pruned some content and they had the best December for selling hurricane shutters which never happens. only thing we did different was prune :)

Answer 18

Kill them all

Comments

(Let God sort 'em out. )

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@newsworthy yes! Finally someone gets it

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A sick American. I jumped out of perfectly good airplanes in the Army.  

Answer 19

Not enough information. Depends on how relevant they are, how well written, how long, etc.  

Answer 20

The better option would be to create a roadmap of how to handle those 100 posts. Look at the and give them a Grade A-F. If the page is duplicate content or not salvageable, delete it Grade F. If several posts can be combined into one authority post Give them a C grade. Combine and redirect. If the content is relevant but poorly optimized, optimize the piece one at a time. Give it a grade of a B.  

Answer 21

Depending on the quality of the posts i would do the following. 1. Combined 2. Deleted unneeded 3. 301 redirects of old urls 4. Build a syndication network( pick one up on fiver etc) 5. Silo everything together 6. Set up RSS and link to syndication network 7. Repost so it hits your syndication network 8. Watch the ranks and traffic raise

Answer 22

You could lose all your rankings if they are inner linked to money pages

Answer 23

You could delete provide 301's but i would make 10 or 20 blogs out of the original 100 keeping original permalinks and dates - 301's to the moved zombie blogs - some new paint and pinstripes (images and video) - then see what happens

Answer 24

Are they linking to any pages that are ranking? just because google drops the traffic on the home page it doesn't mean the homepage is getting those rankings ;)

Comments

@hadik28 linking to absolutely nothing lol. No pages are liking to them either (except a HTML sitemap)

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They are orphaned pages then that are not part of the navigation structure no internal or external links at all. How did they get indexed?  

Answer 25

Is the content relevant to the site's main ranking keywords? If the content is NOT relevant and NOT ranking, I would remove it. I'm going through the same process right now on a site and removing irrelevant content that is not raking, even if it is long-form content.  

Answer 26

Done something similar recently. Site was suffering from Nov 2019 update and traffic crashed from 50k monthly to 8k per month. It had thousands of pages and a lot of keyword cannibalisation which I thought was the main issue. We identified which are the best ranking pages, deleted crap pages, pages with decent content we decided to merge with the better ranking pages, applied 301s on posts with links but no traffic to a relevant page. Just general content cleanup. 2 months later the traffic is now 130k monthly. So I do think there’s a general “quality score” for a site, that or the rankings just recovered due to consolidation of links from multiple pages on the same topic to a single page, and/or creation of bigger, longer, more comprehensive content by merging multiple contents together into a single post. Another major thing we did was also to fix crawl depth and made sure every page was no more than 3-4 clicks away (previously some were 8 clicks deep). Previous to that I just tried to optimise the existing content with POP, cognitive, surfer but didn’t have much luck with the 20 pages we tried it on. We also tried a bunch of links to those pages and it didn’t move the needle either (site is already DR 60+) so i’d probably attribute the recovery to the content clean up.  

Comments

@faizabad Awesome. Those are some amazing results. Congrats.  

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@phenothiazine Thanks. On double checking, it took less than a month for the traffic to start recovering, but traffic is still going up daily without any additional changes. I'm guessing that the crawler is taking time to revisit every page on the website and "re-score".  

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Great results! What kind of redirect did you use on the posts/pages you completely deleted?  

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@frugivorous I didn't 301 pages that we're deleted. They we're deleted because they didn't bring any value whatsoever, 0 traffic, 0 links, more or less 0 keywords - if the content was at all decent, I saved it and looked to add-on to a better ranking page on the same topic if there was a fit. But I didn't see any value in 301 as I wasn't redirecting any traffic nor Pagerank. Pages with external links but not ranking - I 301 to a better page on similar/same topic. If it had decent content too, I may merge the content into the page I'm redirecting it to (within reason i. e it makes sense to merge the content). Pages that was already ranking and had traffic I left alone, or used as the "main" page of which I'd 301 poor performing pages of the same topic to. If pages had traffic and rankings but no backlinks, even better, I 301'd poor performing pages that had backlinks to it to give it the extra juice.