Considering removing content from your website? It's not as easy as you might think. Deleting older content on your website or blog needs to be done with your team's SEO strategy in mind.
Why does your SEO strategy matter when removing content? The answer can be complicated, but to boils down to a few key reasons.
- Organic Traffic. Older content can continue to drive traffic to your site through search engines. Search engines value websites with a rich history of relevant content, so keeping old posts can help improve your site's search engine rankings.
- Relevance. Do you have older keywords that are performing well for your team? If so, we suggest, you consider updating and repurposing this old content. This will save time and effort compared to creating new content from scratch. By revisiting and refreshing older posts, you can offer your audience a fresh perspective on existing topics.
With your team's SEO Strategy in mind, let's elaborate on some of the pros and cons that teams often evaluate when contemplating deleting old content.
Pros: delete it.
- Improve user experience: Removing outdated content that cannot be updated and conveying information that is no longer accurate improves the user's experience. No one wants to look up outdated information that is no longer relevant.
- Not relevant to your site's topic: A piece of content that is ranking for a topic completely unrelated to your site's topic can dilute your search engine rankings. Keeping your overall strategy in mind is ideal and key when deciding what content stays and what content goes.
- Meet your crawl budget: When was the last time you looked over your crawl budget? If not all your content is getting crawled by the Google bot regularly, it may make sense to eliminate low-value pages, as recommended by Google.
Cons: repurpose it!
- Loss of backlinks: Deleting old content will result in a loss of backlinks. Backlinks that were once pointing to your now deleted content can negatively your search engine rankings, as discussed by Semrush.
- Loss of internal links: Content silos depend on many internal links from related content to rank. Deleting older content may diminish rankings on other similar pages.
- Loss of topical authority: Older content contributes to Google's opinion of your site's topical authority This authority builds slowly over time with each URL. A loss of topical on your subject matter can drastically impact the rankings of topics related to his odler content according to Semrush findings.
- Lost opportunity to rerank: Removing old content gets rid of your chance to quickly rerank by simply refreshing and updating older content.
There are several ways to repurpose old content on your website or blog rather than deleting it:
Update your content: One option is to update the content with new information or statistics to make it more relevant to your audience. This is the best option as it gives you a chance to regain lost traffic and even gain more new traffic than the original.
Re-invent the content: Is the information still relevant, but not performing how you'd wish? Re-invent the content. Does it need a fresh take or perhaps to be delivered in a different medium? Content can relay the same message, but changing the medium it's delivered in might be just the refresh need to increase engagement.
Refocus and shift: There is no harm in rewriting parts of your content to focus on a variation keyword that has lower competition. At the very least consider creating a redirect if the content is out of date and cannot be updated or refocused.
Remember: When auditing your content make sure to pull a full year's view of the data as many keywords only get seasonal traffic. It's always a safer, and more efficient option to update or refocus or at the very least redirect content rather than simply deleting it.
Next Steps:
If you choose to remove content, keep a holistic view of your content, and SEO strategy is key when reviewing and removing content. When removing content be sure to do so individually instead of in bulk so as to not impact SEO.