Although many SEO specialists understand the value and importance of deleting old pages from a website, there are still many companies that we speak to that have been advised by their chosen digital marketing agency that removing dated content is a bad idea.
It’s not.
Imagine that your website is a garden, and all the content generating traffic, links, and visibility are your flowers. The content that is failing to offer any value to your website are weeds, and we know the importance of pulling weeds before they kill your flowers.
This is why it is important that you regularly delete old pages from your website, especially if they are offering little to no value from an SEO perspective.
If they have a low online authority score, fail to appear effectively within the organic search results, or aren’t generating a high volume of page views, then we recommend that you pull those weeds before they strangle your quality content.
Leaving poor quality, dated content on your website can negatively impact your SEO performance, including:
- Reduce your crawl budget.
- Lower the overall online authority of your domain.
- Create page and keyword cannibalisation issues.
- Weaken on-page user-experience and average visitor duration.
What should you do?
If you have the time to update and improve upon your existing content, this is always the best solution.
If not, it is best to delete the poor performing page and stream-line the content on your website. After all, SEO is all about quality over quantity.
