Content pruning
The practice of removing outdated, low-quality, or non-performing pages from a website to improve user experience and maximise crawl budget on search engines.
Imagine your website is a garden. Over time, overgrown bushes and dead flowers (low-performing and outdated/irrelevant information) can start to take over. Just as an unwanted plant is removed to make the garden more beautiful, content pruning removes ineffective content to improve the overall performance of your website.
Although not always true, regularly pruning content based on a deeper understanding of your website visitors behaviour can help improve page rankings and organic traffic.
Content pruning is usually done in order to:
- Improve website quality by removing irrelevant information
- Remove content that may be penalizing search engine rankings (i.e. thin content or duplicating content)
- Free up resources like crawl budget so that higher-quality content can be promoted
- Maintain brand consistency by removing content that no longer aligns with the brand's current image.
- Author
- Wen Lin Poh
- Published
- January 26, 2025
- Updated
- February 21, 2025