Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
How content pruning works (with real examples) There are a few mechanisms through which content pruning might improve your website performance: Pruning pages can help make better use of your crawl budget Google allocates a certain amount of time and resources to crawling a website, known as crawl budget. On really big websites, it’s possible that some pages won’t get crawled (and appear in search) because your crawl budget just isn’t big enough. In these cases, content pruning could allow you to make better use of your crawl budget. By pruning content that you don’t want indexed, you’re reducing the total amount of pages that need to be crawled and increasing the likelihood that other, more important pages, end up crawled and indexed. When SEO Consultant Francesco Baldini and team audited a vehicle valuation platform, he found that most of the website’s crawl budget was used on low-quality programmatic pages which resulted in no search visits or conversions. When they deleted almost 5 million pages (going from 4,860,000 pages to just 1,500), organic visits increased by 160% and conversions by 105% in a matter of weeks: In case the mechanism of action is in doubt (did deleting pages really improve indexing?), it’s worth reading about Victor Pan’s experience deleting 3,000 pages from the HubSpot sitemap: “As of two weeks ago, we’re able to submit content, get it indexed, and start driving traffic from Google search in just a matter of minutes or an hour. For context, indexation often takes hours and days for the average website.” It’s worth pointing out that both of these examples feature extremely big websites—crawl budget is not an issue for most smaller sites. Further reading Removing low-quality pages might help the remaining content rank better Some of Google’s systems—like Helpful Content—look at your website as a…
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