Why and how to delete content in bulk for SEO

August 25, 2022 keywordana

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.

Why delete content?

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.

Better put, here is what Google’s Gary Ilves told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz about Panda:

“[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.

Here’s a great article on this concept by Glenn Gabe.

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.

Mueller commented on this in a 2021 Office Hours, saying:

“For search engines, you are building out your reputation of knowledge on that topic. If Google can recognize that a site is good for the broader topic, then it can surface that site for broader queries on the topic as well.”

There are many ways to build topical authority, for example:

Adding backlinks from other websites that are authorities on the topic.
Controlling relevance through internal links and anchor text.

A favorite approach to gaining topical authority is publishing a lot of highly relevant, in-depth content on the topic. With a good base of helpful content on a topic, Google is much more likely to trust you for that topic by giving you higher rankings.

However, for the same reasons that this approach works when done right, it can also hurt the website when done wrong.

Publishing content about a lot of topics, without building out topical authority on each of those topics, can dilute your website’s overall authority.

There are several ways to fix topics that are not well built out. In a perfect world, you’d prefer to fully build out that topic with lots of rich, in-depth content. However, this takes time and a healthy budget.

Deleting content is often a simpler and quicker approach.

Let’s dive into one specific situation.

Backstory

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.

For the second half of 2020, traffic and rankings started to decline across all parts of the website. By early 2021, traffic was down 40% from its previous June 2020 high.

Evaluation

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.

However, when you isolated the URLs from the three different product lines, it became pretty clear:

The oldest product and related content were performing worse than in previous years, but not dramatically worse. However, newer content that was published in this product silo was significantly slower to rank.
The two newest products and related content had lost the vast majority of their rankings and traffic.

Grouping “content silos” when analyzing poor performance is a great way to determine where problems might be.

In addition, when isolating traffic and keyword rankings from different silos, it’s important to distinguish if the losses are happening to one or two pages, or to the vast majority of the pages in the silo.

It’s common for a large share of traffic on a website to come from only a handful of pages. And, if one or two of those pages lose several key rankings, overall site traffic can drop considerably. But it isn’t as though all pages experienced a traffic drop.

On the contrary, when the majority of pages in a silo lose traffic and keyword rankings, it is a much bigger reflection on the entire silo.

Here is an example. We isolated the newer product lines, which revealed massive drops across the board.