No, ‘content pruning’ isn’t something that your Nan does with a pair of scissors and the Sunday newspaper. It’s the act of unpublishing or removing pages from your site for strategic reasons (more on those later). And in the age of AI search and the resulting shockwaves that AI crawlers have caused, content pruning just got that bit more vital. 

But how does it work? What are the downsides of pruning valuable content, and how does all of this impact the performance of your site? Grab your sharpest scissors, a mug of something hot and tasty, and let’s run through what you need to know.

Why is content pruning so important? 

In the big bag of SEO tools that we use every day, content pruning might not seem like the most valuable. But sometimes, getting your site’s content in line can have surprising results. 

If your site is bloated with outdated blogs, redundant pages, or content that is factually incorrect, search engines won’t like you. Sounds dramatic, but Google’s guidelines around restricted content specify that pages that spread misinformation or misrepresentation can negatively impact your visibility to users. 

You also want to be seen as an authority within your niche. If you’re seen as the go-to bastion of knowledge for a particular topic, then your pages will likely be shown to more users, and they’ll engage more frequently.  

If, however, readers would sooner turn to Joe Bloggs on the street and ask their opinion on hairless cat grooming (or whatever services you’re selling), then your perceived authority will be quite low. You can use tools such as Semrush to get an idea of your current standing. 

One of the most effective ways to tidy up your site? Content pruning. Strategically deleting pages in this way has a number of benefits: 

Reduce content cannibalisation

If you’ve got lots of blogs covering similar topics, or multiple service pages with considerable crossover, content pruning can help. Merging these like-for-like pages results in one stronger page that users will find organically, and will prevent you from competing with yourself for keywords (and eyeballs). 

Crossover can be subjective, though, and you don’t always want to delete pages that are performing well just because they’re similar to others. Not sure where to begin? Speak to our experts – we do this kind of thing every day! 

Improve crawl efficiency 

Did you know that your site has a limited crawl budget? This determines how often your site is crawled by search spiders, and if you have thousands of unnecessary pages, your most valuable content might not be included in the crawl. 

This mainly affects sites with hundreds of thousands of pages, so smaller websites should be in the clear – but using best practices and pruning content from the start sets you up for success as you grow. Cut down the fluff so only the cream of the crop is indexed by Google. 

Boost user experience

Have you browsed a website recently and noticed a banner about COVID-19 safety practices? Does this make you feel protected, or just take you back to a darker time we’d all sooner forget? Or, worse, make you lose confidence in the source of the information? 

Content pruning is vital for keeping your site’s experience fresh, so that users don’t leave with a bad (and dated) taste in their mouth. 

How do you prune content? 

We’d love to say “just delete old pages”, but this won’t work. Your outdated or low-performing content might decrease, but you’ll likely experience negative SEO ramifications that outweigh the satisfaction of hitting that big red ‘DELETE’ button. 

There’s a process that you should follow, and it looks like this: 

1. Determine how and why you’re pruning content
2. Analyse performance and backlinks
3. Build out a timeline
4. Merge and redirect
5. Measure

1. Establish the how and why

Content pruning doesn’t work in isolation. Your website has lots of stakeholders – SEOs, sales teams, product managers, PR experts – and all of them will have something to say about the pages you’re planning to cut. 

Sketch out a plan of action, and get everybody in a room to share this. A content prune isn’t something to be taken lightly, so take the time to do it right. 

2. Analyse the performance of affected pages

Everything that we do at Footprint Digital is based on data. Data makes the world go round. It reveals secrets. Uncovers opportunities. And shines a light on what’s underperforming – or doing surprisingly well. 

Before you begin culling pages willy-nilly, make sure you understand whether they need to go. A simple check of the page’s historic engagement is a great first step: “Always check the page URL in Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA4) over the last 12 months for rankings, clicks, and conversions,” says Levi Clucas, Technical SEO Manager here at Footprint Digital. “If numbers are low or recently tapered off, you’re unlikely to see much impact from unpublishing. But if it’s got good performance, updating it is usually better than removing.”

Always check the page URL in Google Search Console and Google Analytics over the last 12 months

Also, make sure you’re assessing topical authority (also known as cosine similarity, which is a very techy way of saying how ‘on-topic’ your content is for the keywords you’re targeting). 

Another major factor that will help you to decide what to keep, merge, or delete is backlink authority, but we’ll cover this in detail later. 

3. Build out a timeline

If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of redundant pages to delete, it may be tempting to cut them all in one fell swoop. But there are several reasons why batching your changes is the better course of action: 

Declining organic traffic: When you monitor the impact of your content prune, you might notice negative changes to your site’s performance. If only a batch of pages has been deleted, rather than the full list, it’s easier to wind back any changes

Creating orphaned pages: If a webpage isn’t linked to anywhere else on your site, it’s known as an ‘orphaned page’. This miserably sad term sends shudders down the spines of any self-respecting SEOs, because orphaned pages struggle to be found and indexed by search engines. Batch-pruning can limit the number of pages you’ll accidentally orphan 

Harming crawl equity: Similar to the creation of orphaned pages, a scorched-earth cull of your pages can result in many 404 page errors. This is what happens when a user tries to access a page that no longer exists. 404s are a leading cause of bad user experiences, and search engines also hate this kind of thing 

Of course, if your content prune is managed correctly, none of these concerns will ever materialise. If you’re uncertain about handling it all yourself, get in touch, and we can help. 

4. Merge and/or redirect

You can’t just delete old pages, dust off, and pop down the pub – as much as we’d love that solution. You need to establish a strategy for where users will now go, which often comes in the form of a 301 redirect. 

Best practice when conducting a content prune is to redirect deleted pages to a similar, published alternative. For blogs, this might mean a newer version of the page that contains more relevant information. For service pages, you could send users to a new service that you’ve launched in the old one’s place. 

Keep your redirect pathways to a minimum, though. A 301 redirect is perfectly fine when used sparingly, but redirects upon redirects can slow down your site’s load times, and send crawlers on a wild goose chase: “When removing or redirecting blogs, always update internal links to point directly to the new version,” says Issy Howson, a Technical SEO Manager at Footprint Digital. “This keeps site architecture clean and avoids unnecessary redirect chains.”

When removing or redirecting blogs, always update internal links to point directly to the new version

5. Measure, measure, measure

Everything is led by data. We might have said this already, but it’s so important to let the numbers lead when executing on any strategy (something that we believe so much, we wrote a whole book about it!).  

Benchmark things like overall site traffic and engagement rates before you undergo content pruning, and compare this afterwards to see what effect your actions have had. If you notice any unexpected dips, be thankful that you followed Step 3 and can fix them in manageable chunks. 

What about backlink authority? 

Technically, assessing backlink authority is part of the content pruning process. But it’s so important (and easy to overlook) that we wanted to cover this separately. 

Of all the ways in which Google and other search engines assess your site’s authority, backlinks are among the most important. Great backlinks build authority – plain and simple. And just because a page looks dated on the surface, doesn’t mean that it isn’t working wonders for your domain authority behind the scenes. 

“Don’t overlook potential link weight. A page may show no recent traffic but still carry historic link equity,” says Chris Ainsworth, Technical Director at Footprint Digital. “Removing it without preserving that value through a relevant redirect can impact overall search performance.”

Don’t overlook potential link weight. A page may show no recent traffic but still carry historic link equity

301 redirects can preserve backlink authority if the redirected page has a similar focus to the original, so be careful when unpublishing pages that have been cited by major voices within your industry. 

If the page is truly redundant, however, then don’t worry too much. Redirects are really important for creating positive user journeys, but if the content you’re pruning has no real value, it should be safe to remove. 

Essential content pruning tips

Follow the process, and you can’t go far wrong. To summarise, here’s everything you should keep in mind during your content pruning journey: 

Sometimes, updating is better: Published pages have existing domain authority. New pages do not. If you have a blog that’s underperforming but could do better with fresh stats and data, this is often the better way to go.

Remember to E-E-A-T: People leave companies – it happens. But if you have loads of blogs written by a team member who has long since departed, this can have subtle (but long-term) impacts on your site’s perceived E-E-A-T score. Update the author or consider removing these if they’re no longer relevant.

Don’t forget backlink authority: We can’t stress this enough: backlinks are vital. If your page is being linked to by many external sources, avoid unpublishing wherever possible. The SEO gods will thank you. 

But does any of this matter in the age of AI? 

Of course it does! 

Some SEOs might tell you that AI has turned everything on its head, but the more rational of us appreciate that AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini have just iterated on everything we previously understood. 

Because of this, using content pruning and backlinks to tidy up your site and entice readers is more important than ever. Sites with engaging, highly-trusted content are potentially cited more frequently in AI responses, so if you haven’t taken the time to get all of your content up to scratch, it’s time to change that. 

Unsure how you’re performing in AI tools? We’re here to help 

Remember how we said that data is all-important and vital for a successful strategy? That goes double for AI platforms. 

Lots of businesses are struggling to navigate AI search – let us help. Our brand-new, proprietary tool, Response RAIDar, helps you to understand how your brand is currently being cited and what you can do to overcome any visibility roadblocks. 

AI doesn’t have to be scary. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with our experts for a free trial.