Based on our observations with this recent core upgrade, your website will likely struggle SEO to rank organically. If your website contains a plethora of outdated blog entries, product pages, announcements, and so on, now is the time to “prune.”

Content pruning is deleting low-performing, old content from your website’s archives. This is the item that serves no use or is no longer relevant. The material isn’t doing your website any favors right now, so trimming the unhealthy growth is preferable to letting it stagnate. There are many benefits to content pruning. It is more compelling, but it can also increase your content’s chance of becoming viral.

Moreover, longer content attracts more natural links and is referenced more frequently by industry experts. Finally, content pruning will help you cut through the fluff and focus on creating excellent content that will bring you more traffic and leads.

Unpublishing content

To ensure your search engine visibility, you need to avoid removing content from your website. This is what is SEO all about.  Many content management systems can deactivate a page without removing content from your website. However, unpublishing content will result in a page being unavailable for users, sending a 404 response code. Once you unpublish a page, it’s no longer linked to your website.

Identifying posts to prune

The first step in identifying posts to prune in your SEO strategy is to monitor the performance of these content pieces. Look for inbound links, which refer to internal pages. These links are signals for search engines, indicating that your content is worth reading. If you notice that some posts are getting almost no traffic or are no longer relevant to your business, you may need to prune them. There are several ways to identify posts that need to be pruned.

One way to prune your content is to unpublish it. However, unpublishing content will break the links, which are crucial to the performance of your SEO strategy. For example, if you’ve written about an artist, you’ll know that his needs are very different from those of a soccer player. But you’ll need to do more than just unpublish the posts. Your site requires to function as a brain, and it needs to be able to recognize posts that are not relevant to your business.

Getting a page reindexed

If you’ve had a page removed from your site, can you get it reindexed? It takes a few minutes to do, and you should see a note once it’s submitted. Then check the page a few days later to ensure it’s been adequately reindexed. Look for warnings or errors, and make changes to the page.

Google re-indexing is a complex process, and you must have the patience to wait for the results. You’re more likely to see results from your new page if the changes are made on your home page or high-level category pages. Google bots will notice changes to these pages faster, and the name of your site plays a vital role in getting a page reindexed.