Do you have a website with multiple pages e.g. a blog with lots of post, category and tag pages? Or a webshop with numerous category and product pages?
Do you know which of these pages actually get traffic i.e. are viewed by your users/customers?
The simple objective of this post is to make you get rid of pages, that do not add value to your site – and hopefully improve both the SEO and UEX on your website:
- The SEO-part: Your site has a finite amount of linkjuice/pagerank that search engines use to evaluate the relevancy and trust of your site. That linkjuice is distributed across your site through links. Roughly said (and everything else equal), for every new page you add to the site, each page is devaluated. This is NOT an argument for not adding new content to your site, but my point is that you should remove pages, that do not give you any traffic from the search engines.
- The UEX-part: Why have content on your site, that users don’t care about? Why confuse or annoy your customers by showing links on your site to pages with low-quality content? If you only offer the best posts or products to your user/customers, you can improve their perception of your site.
Here’s how to do it in 3 simple steps
- Get a list of all pages on your site. If you don’t have that use the site-operator in Google (site:www.yourdomain.com). You need this in order to get the full overview of your pages.
- Go to Google Analytics or whatever you use and find a content list that shows how many pageviews each of your webpages had in the last 2 months. You need this list in order to see what pages get traffic.
- Now remove all pages on the first list from your website that do NOT exist on the second list. If you’re into some really serious cleaning up, you could also remove some of the worst performing pages that appear on your second list.
Isn’t this a bit radical? Yes it is, but survival of the fittest also applies to the pages on your website. Why keep and maintain content that gets no traction?
Checklist and things to consider:
- Getting rid of pages does not nessecarily means that you should get rid of your content. Will that piece of text fit into another post? Can you reuse the photos somewhere else?
- Some pages don’t get a lot of traction, but they might provide some other value e.g. privacy policy pages, contact pages, about us etc.
- remember to alter or remove your internal links to the removed pages. And more importantly, have external linkers change their links
- If you recently added new content to your site, it may take some times before the search engines have indexed and ranked it properly.
- If your site has a lot of seasonal content e.g. for Christmas or summer time, you should extend the 2 months to include this season
- Remember to give a 410 (perm. removed) or 404 (page not found) header response code for the removed pages. You can also make a 301 permanent redirect to other pages of your site.
