You have reached the point when cleaning out the content present on your website is necessary. It’s time to update or unpublish the hundreds of content assets now lying around and harming your website. However, you don’t just do this at random.
The analysis procedure and how to start planning a clean-up are covered in this Blog.
The most crucial question is how to remove out-of-date content without harming your rankings.
Balancing Old and Outdated Content
You should be aware that not all outdated stuff is old before we continue. Simply said, old content has lost its accuracy or relevance as a result of changes in the world, your sector, or your industry. This kind of stuff provides no value to your brand and harms how users interact with your website.
What to do with his website’s archived content is the question that crosses your mind, then it’s imperative to remember that it’s not necessarily horrible just because it’s old. You could keep it if you think that’s solid stuff you want to publish with your website and your name. However, before it harms your site’s reputation and ranking, it is advisable to update outdated content. If you cannot edit the content on your own, you can seek the content writing service offered by a digital marketing agency for high-quality content.
First, look at the advantages of eliminating outdated content before diving into the specifics.
The Value of Removing Outdated Content are as follows:
Lowers the Bounce Rate
Imagine someone visiting your page to find a solution to a social media issue and finding out your content uses outmoded methods. There is no need to discuss the user’s subsequent activity. Out-of-date material automatically lowers your site’s credibility by giving the impression that you lack knowledge and expertise in the subject. The user experience and bounce rate of your website will be enhanced by removing this content.
Boosts Natural Traffic
After updating and eliminating outdated information, Search Engine Journal saw more organic traffic and more than 60% page views. Elite Strategies also experienced an increase in overall search impressions and increased traffic to its pages while updating some of its outdated content and deleting others. Search engines tend to favour recently updated content, which automatically increases traffic.
Prevent Being Punished by Google
Who questioned what the main objective of Google is? To deliver the most accurate and trustworthy results to users depending on their search queries. Google prioritises pages with the most recent and reliable information because of this. However, they penalise websites with out-of-date content.
Google classifies outdated or erroneous content as low-quality content in accordance with its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. “Main material is low quality if produced with insufficient effort, originality, talent, or competence to accomplish the page’s goal satisfactorily. Informational pages with a few minor errors are of low quality. However, if the page has damaging inaccuracies or has so many that it feels unreliable, the lowest updating or taking down out-of-date content raises your authority and ranking. Knowing the advantages of updating obsolete content will give you a better understanding of how to spot it.
How to Spot Outdated Content
Here are the standards for old content:
- Gives false information
- Does not generate traffic
- Has no backlinks
- Has thin content
- Displays out-of-date, sensitive news
- No longer pertinent to your business
- Includes a variety of irrelevant announcements.
However, how can you recognise this kind of content?
Complete a content audit
An SEO content audit is an organised, actionable list of indexable content that helps you decide what to consolidate (or remove! ), what to enhance, and what to leave in its current form. It is advisable to use Screaming Frog to perform a thorough technical SEO assessment. This programme is a website crawler that checks for typical SEO problems and lets you view the outcome in real-time.
This tool can be used to find pages that receive no traffic. Additionally, you may locate the oldest pages on your website that require updating using the ‘Publication’ date feature. The ability to combine this tool with Google Analytics and Search Console for improved examination of out-of-date content is its most significant feature.
Utilise Google Search Console
Through the Google Search Console, locate pages that once received a lot of traffic but no longer do. Additionally, some pages rank well but receive few clicks. (These pages might require updating or fixing.)
When conducting this analysis:
- Visit your Google Search Console profile.
- In the sidebar on the left, select performance.
- Click Compare after selecting the date icon. (You can contrast the most recent 28 days with the previous three months.)
- Click on pages as you go down to compare click and impression rates.
Work on Google Analytics
Every page of your website can be viewed in the Google Analytics overview. You can use this tool to sort pages by page visits, or bounce rate can be used to find out-of-date content. Discover how to locate out-of-date pages with Google Analytics.
SEO Tools Can Benefit You:
You can find obsolete material efficiently with SEO Tools like Animalz Revive, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SemRush, Moz, and many others. You can use it to find the pages stealing authority from your site.
Best Practises to Remove outdated content
Should you delete or keep outdated (low-quality) articles? If you look at it and think, Oh, this is embarrassing for me now; I don’t want it to be online; it’s so horrible. Then it is suggested either to improve it or remove it.
There are primarily two techniques to remove dated content from your website:
- Enhance it
- Delete it
Other tactics comprise:
- Change the page’s URL
- Embrace the no-index tag
Let’s get into more detail about these points!
Update and improve the material on your website
You don’t want any of the out-of-date information on your website. Why? They are well-known and already have backlinks. You may maintain your website’s reputation, improve its ranks, and increase visitors by updating material with pertinent information, current advice, and tactics. Furthermore, Google favours evergreen material; by maintaining your content with correct and up-to-date information, you can raise your website’s SEO rating and ranking.
Additionally, upgrading out-of-date content will improve the user experience on your website. Everyone visits sites with current and pertinent content, you know.
Get Rid of the Content
In order to avoid having your ranking affected, there are SEO variables to consider before deleting a page from your website:
– Check the performance of the page in Google Analytics. Does the page no longer help you achieve your objectives? Does the page’s conversion rate from organic search continue to decline?
– Will taking down the page not impact how people find your site? Has the page’s ranking dropped significantly?
– Examine Google Search Console to gather pertinent information regarding the content.
– Look into its traffic. Does the page still drive traffic to your website?
After considering all these things and realising the page won’t benefit your website, remove it!
To quickly Remove outdated content pages from Google, you can also use the New Removal Tool in Google Search Console.
This device aids you in:
- Remove stuff from Google Search temporarily
- Identify the websites that Google users have marked as obsolete.
- Determine which pages Google’s SafeSearch Filter has filtered.
