What is Pruning?
Pruning (or) content pruning is the practice of removing irrelevant, low-quality, or low-traffic content from a website.
Pruning is a form of content management and maintenance. The overall goal is to improve your SEO, the quality of the content on your site, and the user experience for your visitors. The webpages removed during pruning are usually of the type:
- Duplicate pages
- Outdated pages
- Irrelevant pages
- Thin content pages
- Content that doesn’t convert
- Webpages that generate low-traffic
There are multiple methods of identifying content to be pruned. Some commonly used methods include:
- Analyzing website analytics to identify pages with low traffic or high bounce rates
- Manually reviewing content to identify thin, duplicate, outdated, and irrelevant pagesÂ
- Analyzing user engagement metrics like time on page, scroll depth, and social shares to identify low-engagement pagesÂ
- Using keyword research tools to identify pages that are not ranking well
- Examining your site’s backlink profile to determine pages with spammy or low-quality linksÂ