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Is low-quality content dragging down your website’s “reputation of knowledge“?
It could be.
Could older or outdated content be to blame?
Maybe.
But low-quality content isn’t defined as “the date it was published.” Nothing is that simple – there are many other factors at play. Google repeatedly emphasized this after CNET deleted thousands of old pages.
Pruning content for SEO in bulk isn’t a magic fix that guarantees a rankings boost for all the remaining pages.
Older content on your website shouldn’t harm your SEO performance as long as it’s of good quality. Look no further than The New York Times.
Read on to find out how to assess the quality of your content from an SEO perspective and how to decide whether you should improve or remove that content.
Quality content comprehensively answers questions, solves problems or otherwise satisfies the group of people Avinash Kaushik would call your “largest addressable qualified audience,” in his See/Think/Do/Care model.
Other attributes of quality content:
Not every piece of content will have all of these attributes. But great content should incorporate as many of these attributes as possible.
Google has also provided insights into what it considers quality content in Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. It provides specific questions you should ask yourself when self-assessing the quality of your content:
Also, you should be familiar with E-E-A-T and have read Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines PDF.
Dig deeper: What is quality content
All of these attributes are nice in theory. But how do you turn the concept of “quality content” into something you can measure?
Here are five possible ways to measure “quality”:
Tailor your metrics to your unique situation.
What content do you have? Do a content audit to find out.
This process will help you evaluate whether your content needs to be updated or removed.
Create a spreadsheet with information about your content for some directional guidance. This is what I’ve found to be most useful to me (you may want to include more or other elements):
A couple of quick points about word count: Google has said word count doesn’t matter for SEO and I believe there is no best/perfect word count for SEO. At this stage, I’m looking for symptoms of low quality – word count could indicate issues, though it won’t always be the cause. As with everything, you need to investigate further.
Next comes the hard part: reviewing your content and determining what action to take. This part will require human judgment calls from the people who are experts in the subject matter and those who understand SEO. And remember: many variables influence the success of your content.
Circling back to the key metrics, I typically evaluate whether to improve or remove content based on whether it is:
Before we discuss improving or removing content, we have to talk about a special type of content that needs no changes.
There is a rare form of content that needs no changes (for now) because it:
Leave it alone. (For now.)
Once you’ve earned Position 1 in the organic search results, where will you go? Not up.
No major changes are needed. Just make sure to do routine maintenance on it. Focus your efforts on all the other content that isn’t in this position.
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In more recent years, Google has advised against removing content and suggested making “thin” content “thick” (i.e., better) while also adding more high-quality content. “…don’t remove content someone might find useful,” according to Google’s Gary Illyes.
Likewise, Google’s John Mueller said “improving it is probably the best thing to do in general”
Improving content is more than making a few minor changes and updating your publication date.
You need to assess every detail of your content – and compare it against the content ranking from your competitors. That includes:
An update typically requires the least amount of time investment. At most, about 20-25% of the content needs to be changed.
Your content needs to be rewritten if the following apply:
This is the more extreme form of content update – where up to 100% of the content needs to be written.
Your content needs to be rewritten if:
Sometimes, you have content about a useful, relevant or helpful topic, but it was just written poorly. To address that, make sure to:
Google can forward full PageRank through 301 redirects. However, you get the most value when the new page is as close to a 1:1 match with the topic of the old page.
Here are the reasons why you might want to consider consolidating your content:
Combining content when needed gets Mueller’s approval. He said of the topic:
Here’s how to do it:
Low-quality content is bad for users. And what’s bad for users is bad for SEO.
After Google launched Panda, we learned from Google that content pruning could help rankings for higher-quality content emphasis mine):
“In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
Note the emphasis here is on low-quality content, not old content. That said, old content typically tends to be lower quality. Things break (links, images) and information changes.
While Panda has long been incorporated into Google’s core algorithm, Google’s newer helpful content system is a sitewide algorithm, meaning that “if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, primarily written for ranking in search, then your whole site will be impacted.”
Google told us that “removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”
Same advice, different algorithms. Just replace “low-quality” with “unhelpful”.
Let’s make it simple. Just ask yourself a question:
Here are four ways you can go about answering that question for your content:
What else could negatively impact you? Google has told us via the Search Quality Rater Guidelines:
Types of content to consider culling:
Bottom line: Will anybody miss the content if it’s gone? If your answer is no, it’s time to remove it. This flowchart may be helpful:
If the content can’t be updated in any of the above ways, it’s time to decide whether to remove it – either blocking it from search engines or deleting it from your site.
In cases where you want to keep the content on your site, but not have it appear in search results, blocking the URL is probably your best bet. You can do that by adding the noindex meta tag.
One other alternative is to require a password to view the content.
Remove it from your site.
It doesn’t matter to Google whether that page has a 410 or 404 status, Mueller said in a 2018 Webmaster Hangout:
“From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index.
We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist.
The subtle difference here is that a 410 will sometimes fall out a little bit faster than a 404. But usually, we’re talking on the order of a couple days or so.
So if you’re just removing content naturally, then that’s perfectly fine to use either one. If you’ve already removed this content long ago, then it’s already not indexed so it doesn’t matter for us if you use a 404 or 410.”
Improving, removing and consolidating content is good SEO.
It’s hard work – and it’s not quick. Done right, it’s absolutely worth it in the long term.
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