Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning is removing low-relevance or low-quality pages to improve website performance.
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed:
Does “content pruning” (i.e. deleting some non-performing content) always lead to increase in search traffic for the content that is left?
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) February 13, 2024
So how does pruning actually work? And when is the risk worth it?
How content pruning works (with real examples)
There are a few mechanisms through which content pruning might improve your website performance:
Pruning pages can help make better use of your crawl budget