What is Pruning?
Pruning refers to the practice of removing thin, irrelevant, duplicate, outdated, low-quality, non-performing, non-converting, and low-traffic content from a site. It is also called content pruning and helps bloggers manage and maintain the content they publish on their sites.
Bloggers use multiple methods to determine what content to prune. Some common ones include:
- Analyzing their analytics to identify pages with low traffic or high bounce rates
- Reviewing your backlink profile to determine pages with low-quality backlinks
- Manually reviewing their content to identify duplicate, outdated, and thin content pages
- Analyzing user engagement metrics like time on page, scroll depth, and social shares to identify pages with low engagement
Benefits of Content Pruning
Content pruning is important because it helps maintain the quality and relevance of the content published on a site. This helps to improve the site’s SEO performance et user experience. It also reduces bounce rates and potential search engine penalties.
Now, it is normal for a website to accumulate outdated, low-performing, and duplicate content over time. However, such content can cause SEO issues like keyword cannibalization. They can also dilute your link equity, Classement, et site authority.
Unpruned content can also exhaust your crawl budget and will frustrate your visitors, increase your bounce rates, and reduce your conversions. In extreme instances, they can cause serious crawling et indexing issues that hurt your SEO performance.
Bloggers can avoid these SEO and user experience issues by updating or pruning their content. When they prune, they remove the content from their site, ensuring only relevant content is available to search engines.
This improves crawl efficiency and rankings and ensures only helpful results are available on search results pages. They also improve the site’s user experience, ensuring visitors can locate accurate, up-to-date information at all times.
Drawbacks of Content Pruning
Some SEOs and bloggers believe content pruning is not helpful. Many say they do not see any changes in their rankings after pruning their content. Some bloggers have even complained about losing traffic and rankings after pruning.
Even bloggers who believe in the benefits of pruning understand it can cause serious SEO and user experience issues when done improperly.
A major disadvantage is the risk of accidentally deleting pages that generate organic traffic, backlinks, and conversions. Such deletion can lead to a sudden and severe drop in rankings, referral traffic, leads, and revenue.
Poorly planned pruning can also disrupt the site’s interne et external links structure, leading to Liens brisés et 404 introuvable pages. This will cause the blogger to miss out on the link equity and PageRank, which would have flowed from such pages.
Another issue lies in the resources required to prune a site. Pruning requires comprehensive SEO audits, data analysis, and sound judgment to determine which content to prune. This can put considerable strain on a site’s content creation team.