Content Cleansing: Why & How You Must Improve or Remove Old Content

Could old content be dragging down the overall "authority" of your website? We think so. If we agree this is true, then you have an important decision to make: should you improve your old content or remove it? Making the right decisions during this process can bring great rewards, in terms of traffic, organic search visibility (rankings, featured snippets, etc.), links, conversions, and engagement. Google spokespeople have downplayed the idea that "old content won't hurt you" and have warned that removing content is a dangerous SEO strategy. But is it really? Not based on our results. For the last 18+ months, Search Engine Journal has been focused on improving and removing old content. And now we're ready to share our impressive results with you. In this session, you will learn: A repeatable process for auditing and evaluating your existing content. We'll tell you how to find out what content you have and what you should be looking at to understand whether your old content is helping you, having no impact, or potentially hurting you. How to tell the difference between high-quality and low-quality content. Is your content high quality or low quality? We'll review what Google has told us over the years, and share some metrics you can use to better evaluate the "quality" of your content. What to do with your existing content. The final step of this process is making data-driven decisions about whether you should improve (update, rewrite, or consolidate) or remove (deindex) old content from search engines. We will also share numerous examples of what we did and how it increased overall site traffic by more than 60+ percent year over year.