Author: Becca McPartland, SEO Strategist at Visualsoft
As webmasters, one of our primary jobs is to create well-written content that our target audience is interested in.
More content and pages on your website mean more URLs that search engine bots have to crawl. It’s important to understand this because Google only devotes a certain amount of resources to crawling your website.
Each page is individually evaluated based on its content, so not everything crawled on your site will be indexed. If search engines are wasting time and crawl budget on indexing old content, it could mean your new pages can’t be found - especially if you have a website with a large number of pages.
Therefore, if outdated or redundant content no longer provides value to your site or customers, re-optimise or remove it.
With that in mind, let’s consider what we can do to help Google as much as possible.
Should I delete old pages from my website?
Large amounts of outdated content on your website can impact how Google crawls your site. But before you jump in and delete anything written more than five years ago, you must evaluate whether the content still benefits your site.
Google cares more about the quality of your content rather than its date. So if something you created years ago is still valuable to your market, is bringing in traffic and converting customers, you don’t want to delete it.
If your content is old and has no impact on your website, it can be deleted. However, before you do this, you should see whether the content can be updated or improved.
If you can’t update your content, look for opportunities to add redirects, taking the customer to a newer, fresher page where necessary. When redirects are not an option, crawl your website with a tool like Screaming Frog to ensure no internal links are pointing to it first. When it’s safe to remove the old content, go ahead and delete the page.
Why you should remove an outdated content page
Think of your website as your home. Having a clean and tidy property makes you happy, right?
Pruning old content and removing redundant pages is a way of clearing the trash from your site, which is great for its overall performance. Deleting outdated and low-performing pages can:
- Boost rankings
- Reduce the risk of keyword cannibalisation
- Improve user experience
- Keep all information up-to-date
How to find old content on your website
You can use two tools - Google Search Console and Google Analytics - to find old content and determine what pages to remove or re-optimise. The good news is, if you’re tracking your website's performance, both should already be set up.
Use Google Search Console to compare data from the last three months to the same period one year ago to show you pages that gained website traffic last year but no longer offer the same benefit. You can identify pages needing extra TLC by looking at those with high impressions but low clicks.
Google Analytics also allows you to find pages offering little benefit to your website. Again, compare the data to last year to find pages that Google no longer loves like it used to.
These steps will help you to find pages receiving little traffic but won’t show those with zero traffic. For this, you’ll need to complete a full content audit, combining the data with a Screaming Frog crawl.
Export all pages and have everything in a Google Sheet to complete a VLOOKUP and match up how many sessions or clicks a page receives and its bounce rate and conversion rate. Any pages without data next to them may not benefit your website.
Complete a manual review of these pages, ensuring to keep everything important to your business. Old news articles, job adverts, ex-staff member profiles or out-of-stock products aren’t worth keeping.
How to decide what old content to keep and update
As already mentioned, you may not need to remove all old content. When asked about removing content from a website, Google’s John Muller said:
“Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad. If you look at it and say: ‘oh, this is embarrassing for me now. I don’t want it to be online; it’s so bad’ either improve it or remove it”.
There will be many instances when you can revamp old content, making it look new and fresh and optimising the page for updated guidelines and better search terms.
Google’s standards have changed dramatically over the years. What may once have been deemed good content may no longer be the case. By identifying old content that once brought in traffic, you can re-optimise it to gain more sessions.
In this example, a blog post initially uploaded on 29 January 2021 didn’t generate much organic traffic for the website. However, we identified several missed opportunities and rewrote the content based on search intent and frequently asked questions. Since republishing the content on April 6th 2022, the post has generated 4,998 organic sessions, an increase of 19,892%.
How to know what pages to keep and re-optimise
Deleting old content should be a last resort unless the page contains irrelevant or misleading information.
With the list of pages you’ve compiled from your content audit, review these manually to identify whether you can improve them. Conduct new keyword research and determine if you can combine these older pages to create one long-form piece. Any pages you can’t combine or improve could be deleted.
In this example, we culled blog content for a client that was no longer relevant. Posts varied from product launches from 2016 to brand collections that the client no longer sold. By removing old articles, combining content, re-optimising where necessary or redirecting users to the most relevant page, our client gained an extra 10,000 organic sessions to the blog.
Top tips for removing outdated content safely
Although deleting old pages may be the best strategic move, you must do it safely. By taking the correct precautions, you can be confident your website won’t be negatively affected.
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Add a 301 redirect
If you have a similar page containing up-to-date information, add a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one. A 301 redirect helps to preserve search traffic and incoming links, making this the most suitable method of safely removing old website pages.
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Use the 410 status
Instead of the standard 404 status when a page is no longer available, the 410 status suggests to Google that you’ve purposefully removed this page. John Muller said that despite being relatively similar in purpose, the subtle difference is that a 410 will sometimes fall out of Google Search Results a little faster than a 404.
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Place a noindex tag on the page
If you want to keep the content on the site but prevent Google from indexing it, add a noindex tag to the page. You should also remove it from your XML sitemap and ensure no internal links are pointing to it.
Why is Google still showing old website pages?
When you delete a page that Google is still indexing, it’s important to note that it won’t always drop out of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) immediately.
Google will stop showing a deleted page once it’s recrawled your website and identified that it no longer exists. If Google has not yet removed the content from its index, it signals that it doesn’t crawl that page often, indicating that it doesn’t deem the page important. If this happens, there’s no need to panic - Google will eventually stop indexing old content.
Can I use Google Search Console’s removal tool?
Depending on the size of your website, it could take weeks or even months for Google to recrawl and make the relevant changes in search results.
You can request the removal of an outdated page via Search Console’s removal tool. Doing this is a quick way to get Google to remove outdated content, as it lets you temporarily block a web page from SERPs on sites you own.
This process hides the URL from Google for a short time and is only a temporary solution. You will still need to redirect the link or use the 410 deleted status to prevent your page from appearing in Google in the long run.
The final tip for removing outdated content from Google
Content creation isn’t always easy, especially when navigating the technical realm of SERPs.
For the best results, keep your website free of excessive amounts of outdated information. A strong clean-up regime will benefit your website in the long run.
To receive more advice on eCommerce SEO, look at our blog post on driving organic traffic.
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