Benign content does not exist — at least, not according to Google.

Thousands of internal Google documents leaked in March revealed just how many inputs their search algorithm considers when ranking pages. A key piece for us at Imprint was the validation of something we’ve long believed true: Google measures and weighs site authority.

We evangelize the positive side of this, such as thinking topic-first — not keyword-first —  and using a pillar-and-cluster strategy to build site authority. It works! However, there is another side to that coin: unhelpful or unrelated content can have the opposite effect.

Enter “pruning.”

What is SEO pruning?

The first step in the process involves auditing the content on your site for helpfulness, relevance and timeliness. You can remedy any issues you find by either updating the content and republishing, or noindex-ing the page. The latter is what we call “pruning.” Noindex is an HTML tag that tells search engine crawlers to ignore the page for ranking. (We advise against outright deleting any pages, as that can result in broken links elsewhere on your site and on others. Broken links will incur additional ranking penalties.)

When should I update a page vs. noindex?

Check to see what queries the page is currently ranking for. If the page is ranking for queries that map to your target audience, updating the content is likely the best choice if you have the available resources. If the page is not ranking at all or is ranking for arbitrary topics, you might be better off noindex-ing the page and focusing on creating new, SEO-driven content.

How do you evaluate the helpfulness of your content?

If the page is for informational queries — users looking for definitions and answers to high-level questions — make sure you’re addressing that intent as clearly and concisely as possible. If the page is for mid- to lower-funnel queries, check to see if you’re demonstrating your authority with proprietary data, case studies or hypotheticals — anything that helps readers make a decision while distinguishing your page.

How do you evaluate the relevance of your content?

A primary way to judge the relevance of your content is to view it through the eyes of your target audience. What are their pain points? What do they value? Your content should reflect those things.

How do you evaluate the timeliness of your content?

Some queries, such as “traditional vs. Roth retirement accounts” or “how often should I take my pet to the vet,” may seem evergreen on the surface but changes in legislation and medical research could date an otherwise OK page. Do some quick searches of your own when evaluating the timeliness of your content to see if anything has changed. To be clear, the publish date of your content has little to no impact on SEO performance — and republishing an old piece as-is will not change anything.

An SEO pruning case study

In March, we put our hypothesis to the test. We audited 100+ blog posts on our site and pruned more than 30 pages. In April, a month later, we checked our organic traffic. It was up 8% compared to March. We checked again in May, and organic traffic had risen another 25% compared to April. The next month, it rose yet another 9%.

During this time, we changed nothing on the back end. Site architecture, Schema markup, asset sizes, page load speeds and internal links all stayed the same. We had published a few blog posts, but those new posts accounted for a minute percentage of the newfound traffic.

Pruning works.

Let us help you prune your content

We’d love to help you increase your organic traffic by auditing and pruning your old content! We can also help you refresh any older pages with SEO potential. Reach out to us at imprint@imprintcontent.com or via our contact page here.