If you have a blog, do you practice post pruning for SEO benefits?

[CanSpace]

A super interesting story today about CNET deleting thousands of old stories in an effort to improve its Google Search results. The internal note suggested removing irrelevant content "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher [...] in search results".

CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search

Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is "not a thing!" as CNET erases its history. The tech news site removed thousands of old articles in a recent bid to appease Google and improve its performance in search results over the past few months.

gizmodo.com

Following this strategy, it means if you run a company blog, you'd be better off removing posts made years ago about outdated PHP or WordPress release notices, for example. Carries absolutely no value today, and keeps blogs fresh.

A Google Liaison rejected the practice, stating it is "not a thing", adding that Google guidance doesn't encourage this.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689018769782476800

Nevertheless, if what Google says is true, then I shouldn't be seeing website owners do it more than I am. So, is anyone curating their existing blogs to that degree?

 

[romes]

When I ran my previous blog years ago, I had pages and pages worth of stuff. I never felt the need to remove any old ones. Each page came with its own keywords and carefully crafted text. Removed them to me would of been like me hurting my own progress. Then again, it was a gaming blog so articles did not get "old" per-say, where-as SEO, financial, business, etc. type articles can become outdated with new techniques or old techniques proven wrong. I feel like it is hit miss and if you did curate your articles, you would need to remove articles you are sure the value they once provided is no longer there.

I hope this made sense lol

 

[SenseiSteve]

I don't delete articles, but I do review them to make sure links are not broken. I'll also tweak the content for word flow or update images that are more "today."

 

[bigredseo]

I read the article yesterday I think, and while I can understand why they did what they did, it's possible they killed off stuff they didn't need to. That said, CNET has always had a lot of extra junk on their site, and comparisons about products from 2007 really doesn't have much value in the market today.

Pruning for SEO, we do this a little bit when it comes to keyword cannibalization. If a particular blog is ranking higher than another that we really want to feature for the same set of keywords, then we will often kill the old one and redirect - depending on traffic and sentiment of the article itself.

Here's a good example that we went through a few years ago;
We used to offer PPC/Adwords Management. We had many articles on tips and tricks about PPC, but this was all before Google's restructuring of Adwords. Since we no longer offered management or anything to do with Adwords, attracting users to our site for that was a waste of time and resources. Yes, the content was already written, but if people are browsing those pages, they'r taking CPU and Memory that could be best used to serve others that we are interested in attracting.

So, in those cases, pruning is well worth it! On the other hand, we don't do anything with Logo Design. But since someone looking for a Logo may also be looking for rebranding and a new website, keeping some of that information is actually worth it.

Now that Google Analtyics 4 is out and running, I wish a lot of people would delete their info about UA (GA3). People wanting to learn how to do "X" today are not wanting the info that was written in 2017, and yet that's the stuff that keeps ranking as it has age, links, authority, etc. How-To guides with Google Data Studio and linking to GA3 are also all outdated, and it's a mess when you try to find any info on those topics.

For the article itself, removing content as an SEO strategy is not really something that works (unless you're dealing with keyword cannibalization). Removing content because it's outdated and not useful - well that's certainly a welcomed practice by any person who is searching the web!