Deleting content, as part
of a larger strategy to improve content quality and increase topical authority,
makes sense. Here's proof.
Whenever I mention deleting
content in bulk to clients or colleagues, I’m usually met with some form of
skepticism or doubt. This is usually wrapped up in several different positions,
all of which make sense.
Many times, great efforts were
made to produce this content, and deleting it is a blow to the emotions. Beyond
the emotional hit is the financial one – content costs money, and good content
costs real money. Throwing it away seems like such a waste.
And then there is skepticism
around the concept – why would deleting content ever be a good idea? If Google
doesn’t like it, they just won’t rank it, right? Bummer, but let’s not throw
the baby out with the bathwater, right? It could rank in the future.
We have deleted content in bulk
on many websites at our agency, and a recent case study I shared on Twitter
surfaced a lot of questions.
Let’s first dive into the idea of
deleting content from a theoretical point. Then, let’s look at the scenario I
was up against and why, in this case, deleting content in bulk made sense.
Finally, the results from our specific use case.
There are several reasons to
consider deleting content in bulk on a website, but the two most pertinent are
related to low-quality content and authority/relevance.
Low-quality content
Ever since Google launched the Panda
update in 2011, their algorithms have been on the hunt for low-quality
content. Panda has been permanently embedded into the core algorithm now, so
websites no longer have to be impacted by a specific algorithm update to see
the effects of low-quality content.
Google evaluates low-quality
content on a page-by-page basis but does aggregate all of the indexed pages
when they evaluate a website for quality. In other words, the quality of
individual articles can affect how your entire site ranks.
“[Panda] measures
the quality of a site pretty much by looking at the vast majority of the pages
at least. But essentially allows us to take [the] quality of the whole site
into account when ranking pages from that particular site and adjust the
ranking accordingly for the pages.”
Google’s John Mueller has also
discussed this concept multiple times, saying low-quality content on one part
of your website can affect your entire website’s rankings.
Deleting the content that Google
determines as “low quality” isn’t a silver bullet. However, as part of a larger
strategy aimed at improving content quality and increasing topical authority,
it can make sense.
Authority and relevance
Newer to the conversation than
Panda is the concept of a website having topical authority. This is closely
related, and oftentimes similar, to the idea that Google’s algorithms need to
see your content as relevant to what your website is an authority on.
The website we were working on
primarily focused on one product line in the fashion niche. Since its inception
in 2018, the brand-built content around this product. The website ranked well
for a variety of terms around this product.
In mid-2019, the brand started to
expand into two more related product lines. At a glance, these three products
seemed to make sense as they all fell under one umbrella.
Throughout the first part of
2020, the website started to gain some traction in rankings and organic traffic
for these two new product lines. However, June 2020 was where that traction
peaked.
It was tricky to evaluate much of
anything in 2020, given that most of the world was shut down due to COVID-19 at
the beginning, and then ended in a flurry of pent-up spending. Everything from
buying patterns to seasonal trends to traffic changes had to be taken with a
large grain of salt.
The drops for this website
weren’t sudden, like something you might see from an algorithm update. The
traffic decline was steady but never dramatic or extreme.
What to do
Taking a step back, it seemed
clear that this could be an authority and relevance problem in Google’s eyes.
For several years, this site only published content around one core topic.
And while the new product lines
seemed closely related, that doesn’t mean that Google transferred that topical
authority over to this new content.
In other words, expanding into
new products/topics might have diluted the authority the site had in its
original product.
Sure, these new product silos
ranked well out of the gate, perhaps relying on the site’s overall authority
for these early rankings.
But, Google will sometimes change
its mind on what your site is and isn’t an authority on, as we discussed above.
This can make sense, especially
upon a deeper evaluation:
Most of the consistent traffic
was going to the first product silo.
Plan of action
There are several viable
strategies to consider in such a situation as this:
Invest heavily into the silos
that are losing, by producing lots of great content, updating old content and
building niche-relevant backlinks.
Delete the content in the silos
that are losing.
Do nothing and hope Google
changes its mind about the silos
Scenario #1 is
expensive, time-consuming and there is no guarantee it will work.
Scenario #2 is
disappointing and removes the opportunity to rank for this content in the
future. There is also no guarantee it will work.
Scenario #3 makes
sense if you can make the case that the content should be ranking. In other
words, you are 100% sure it is the best content on the topic. But, if you can’t
make that case, then this route doesn’t make much sense.
It’s really tough to evaluate if
your content is truly deserving of being the #1 result. I will say that we all
generally tend to overestimate how good our own content is.
For this specific scenario, here
is where we landed:
·
We didn’t think the content in the poorly
performing silos was bad, but it wasn’t the best content available.
·
There probably wasn’t enough of it to fully
establish topical authority, as a look at competitors showed they had a lot
more content than we did.
·
Additionally, the appetite just wasn’t there for a
heavy investment in product silos that hadn’t even been proven yet.
·
In scenario #2, the idea is that you delete the
content silos that Google doesn’t deem you an authority on, thus raising the
overall authority of the site.
·
You also rebalance the relevance of the site.
·
This is what we set out to do.
Action
Once we decided to delete all of
the content from the poorly performing silos, there was some work to be done.
We isolated all of the URLs to be
deleted and then evaluated each URL to see if it had backlinks or not.
We set up 301 redirects from all
of the URLs that had backlinks in order to preserve the authority coming from
those backlinks. We pointed these 301s to the most relevant pages for each URL.
In the end, 26% of the URLs were 301 redirected.
Conclusions
·
It is almost always better to improve the content
rather than delete it. If you can do that, that should be your go-to. However,
as we know, this isn’t always possible, for a variety of reasons.
·
Deleting content is not a silver bullet, and it
doesn’t work every time. Spend the time analyzing the details of the website’s
specific situation to determine if the use case lines up with when deleting
content makes sense.
·
We deleted a lot of content along with publishing
lots of new, topically focused content. If you’re looking for a true A/B test
about deleting content only, this is not it. But the results are compelling
nonetheless.
·
Pay attention to topical authority, even if you
aren’t suffering from traffic drops. Google is constantly tweaking the way its
algorithm evaluates authority and relevance, and you don’t want to fall on the
wrong side of a Core Update.
0 comments:
Post a Comment