Content Pruning
In one sentence
Removing or redirecting pages that are thin, outdated or serve no purpose.
Analogy Mental model
Pruning a fruit tree. Dead branches produce nothing and take nutrients, and cutting them sends the growth to the fruit.
In practice What you actually do
Find pages with no traffic over twelve months, no links, no conversions and no role in the structure. Delete with a 410 when nothing references them, redirect with a 301 when something does. Do it in batches and watch overall performance after each.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Check the links before deleting anything. A page with no traffic can still be the hub passing authority to twenty others, or the destination of a link from a site you cannot replace.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →