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Content Pruning: Understand what content is
content pruning in SEO

Content Pruning refers to removing or pruning old, worthless content from your blog. This is very advantageous, so find out why you should do it!

When people think about content and SEO, they are always focused on creating new content. But people forget about existing content and the impact it has on website performance.


Although it may seem counterintuitive, your rankings can improve after removing some content, which we call Content Pruning. In this context, in recent years it has become clear that the saying "less is more" also applies to content in SEO.


So today we will understand how Content Pruning impacts the SEO and what are the advantages of using this strategy to improve ranking of your website in search engines. Continue reading!

See how you can create one optimization strategy in SEO that is perfect for your website.

What is Content Pruning?

Removal of content or Content Pruning, involves updating or removing content that is weighing down a website, preventing it from performing as well as it could. By removing this dead weight, you increase your overall health.


It's very similar to pruning a tree: by removing dead branches and leaves, you increase the tree's overall health and ensure that all of its energy goes to the parts you want to grow.


Conceptually, this makes sense, but what kind of content is considered dead weight? The answer: content that has lost its usefulness and value.

Examples of content that is typically removed:

  • Pages with outdated information;

  • Pages that are not getting, and will never get, traffic or engagement;

  • Pages with duplicate content or limited content.

Content Pruning is like a content cleaning, a process in which you separate legitimate and useful items from those that have no value. This is important because the google algorithm hates content duplication. Have you noticed this on Google Panda? It is very likely so, especially if you own a small website or less than 100 pages.


It is important to emphasize that the removal of content is not related to any change in the URL or structure of the site. Instead, it consists of removing entire directories and specific pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing in the search result. In this context, you also don't need to remove all potentially redundant content.

See how you can correct your mistakes of Google PageSpeed ​​once and for all.

What are the benefits of Content Pruning?

When you put content up, you want it to provide some benefit to your website. So, when that doesn't happen, you need to find a way to solve this problem. In this situation, what are the advantages of removing content? Check out some below:

Improves overall quality

By pruning content that doesn't add any value, you increases the overall quality of your content. This means you have high-quality content for your audience and search engines.


Additionally, the content you use to SEO You must be up to date with the latest developments in your brand and point of sale. Therefore, if content is not being updated or is out of date, it must be removed.

Improves distribution of link authority

By eliminating content that does not add any value, you are ensuring that the link authority it's only flowing to pages that have potential.


This also means that external links are less likely to point to irrelevant or outdated content. This way, you can ensure that all external links are high quality and authoritative.


If you are unsure about how to remove the content, use a good specialist company to ensure they have organic traffic relevant. You should also monitor the natural performance of your content to know the best time to remove it. With the monitoring, you can tell when organic traffic drops and damaged rankings won't be a surprise anytime soon.

Improves user experience

This leads to a good user experience for visitors, which becomes increasingly important for search engines as well.


Google and other search engines don't just measure key words that you use on your website, but also the user experience.


Therefore, remove irrelevant content allows you to have more space to inform users about common topics associated with your brand and point of sale.

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When we discuss the content removal, we are not talking about a completed cleaning event. We are talking about a continuous cleaning process. Many companies, on the other hand, simply leave old content on their sites to gather dust, and their rankings suffer.


So, whenever possible, carry out the Content Pruning!

How Content Pruning helps your SEO?

O Google is increasingly focused on accuracy, relevance and quality – as well as the timeliness of information. As we face more inaccurate information on the web than ever before, search engines are working double time to prioritize optimizing sites that maintain their updated and reliable content.


So if you're wondering how to adapt to the latest update and your site has a lot of content, our biggest suggestion is prune the content. Eliminate the dead weight holding your website down and make sure every part is in compliance with the quality expectations latest from Google.


To improve the ranking of your website in search engines, you need to have relevant content about the keywords you are using. So, how does the Content Pruning Does it affect organic performance?


There is a certain conflict between the two things: in a year, websites tend to grow a lot in the number of URLs, while the amount of content remains unchanged. Taking into account large organic reaches and large numbers of URLs, this means that search engines are forced to spread organic traffic across a lot of pages to maintain an acceptable content rendering rate.


This is a specific case where Content Pruning really makes sense! When you create many different URLs, your content cannot be updated regularly. Instead, you need to focus on producing quality content. high quality for more pages than you could ever upgrade.


This is the moment when Content Pruning comes into play!

How important is it to remove worthless content from your blog?

You may be wondering: isn't it better to focus on produce new, high-quality content instead of spending time looking at what has already happened? Well, I inform you that no. While we can't get rid of old content, we can make your job much easier so you can always focus on quality.


Every time you create a new post, it's a challenge to keep the site relevant and updated, no matter how frequently you publish new posts.

In fact, directing efforts to developing quality materials is essential, after all, you want traffic on your pages to improve and, for that, your content must be the best.


However, having useless content pages indexed can lead to situations that are detrimental to your performance, which will affect your Bandwidth, your relevance and, consequently, their conversion rates. This is the result of a poor strategy for working with duplicate content.


For example, go to check your homepage pages on Google Search Console and check how long your secondary URLs are. If you have a hundred secondary URLs, it means there are 100 irrelevant URLs on your site.

Signing Off

The focus on Content Pruning is excellent for the health of the site in terms of SEO and performance. If your business needs help with its content pruning strategy, count on experts in SEO da Bytebio which are a reference in the segment MarTech. Talk to our consultants or find out more about Specialized Consulting in SEO.

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