Why Removing Outdated Content Could Save Your Site?
If you find a trend on the internet, you would add content related to it and do the SEO work to rank it. Okay, after the trend is out of fashion, would you remove it or not? If yes, why do you need to do it? Will it affect your website ranking?
Well, this article is there to clear all the questions mentioned above. Let’s start with it.
First, let me put it straight, reviving old content can boost your website’s ranking, so you can remove the outdated content.
If you are confused about what outdated content is, then let me put it in simple words. The inaccurate content lacks value or doesn’t reflect your current brand positioning, then that is outdated content.
Eg, Some outdated advice, time-sensitive content, irrelevant content to your business, discontinued product or service pages are a few examples of outdated content.
Why do you need to remove outdated content?
Google’s main work is to give users good informational content. This is why the recently published content ranks higher than the outdated ones. Low-quality content on your website can lower your site authority. Thus it will be hard to rank your website.
Outdated content will not only affect your website’s SEO; the irrelevant content will create a bad picture of your brand.
How to Find Outdated Content?
Now that you know about the outdated content learn how to find those pages and delete them.
I will suggest some easy methods/tools you can use.
Use the Ubersuggest tool to find out the outdated content on your website quickly. You have to enter your domain name and click on the search button. At the end of the scan, you will get a total analysis of your website.
The next tool coming down the recommendation list is the Google search console. Using this tool, you can find the pages that don’t get more visitors and also analyze their performance.
This is an amazing tool that gives you an overview of how the pages of your website perform. You can get details about almost every post/article, and you can filter it to find unwanted or outdated content with low performance.
The tools mentioned above don’t always show you outdated content. So to get a full detailed analysis to conduct a full content audit to get accurate results.
Which outdated content to remove and which one to keep?
This question might be confusing for many. Well, I agree that I told you to remove outdated content. But you can alter or update content, then why remove it.
So if a page doesn’t get visitors doesn’t mean that it can be ranked at all. You can ask these questions before removing it.
- Is the content relevant to your target audience?
- Does the page get organic visitors?
- Does the page has good backlinks? (important)
- Can you add relevant content & update it?
If your answer is yes, then don’t remove it but update it with better content.
How to remove outdated content without affecting your site’s ranking?
Now that I have answered the “W” questions like “What” “Why,” I will now address how to do it.
The pages that no longer earn organic traffic and have irrelevant content can be removed. You can’t casually delete the content as it might affect your site’s ranking largely.
I will suggest you three different ways to remove outdated content, They are
- Redirect the page – This is the best way to remove outdated content when viewed from an SEO angle.
- Serve a 410 deleted status – You can acknowledge Google that you are intentionally deleting a particular page by updating this status.
- Add a no-index tag – If you don’t want to remove the content/post from Google, add a no-index tag.
Final words:
Removing unwanted or outdated content from your site can help you improve your site’s ranking, crawl capacity, and finally, boost your domain authority. I hope that I have given a clear explanation about outdated content and how to handle it. If you find this article interesting, share it with your buddies.
