20 Jul Can I Clean Up My Website Without Damaging Search Rankings?
Content is the backbone of a website, as it drives traffic to your site and directly affects your engagements and conversions. However, depending on how old your website is, you might have outdated and irrelevant content that can hinder your site’s success. While not all old content is outdated, any content that doesn’t offer any value can negatively affect your website’s reputation and ranking. This is why it is sometimes necessary to do a content cleanup on your website, but it needs to be done correctly if you don’t want to harm your SEO rankings. Luckily, there are ways to clean up content without affecting rankings.
Why is Cleaning Up Outdated Content Important?
There are many benefits to auditing and removing out-of-date content, which is why this step needs to be taken when you have hundreds of content assets gathering dust on your website. Cleaning up your website can help:
• Reduce bounce rate
• Avoid penalties from Google
• Increase organic traffic and page views
How to Clean Up Content Without Affecting Rankings
Conduct a Content Audit
Not all content is outdated and irrelevant, even if it has been on your site for some time. Running a content audit using Google Analytics and Search Console is necessary to determine what can stay and what needs to go. Analyzing your website’s content can help you identify what pages and posts are performing well and which are not. Once you determine what is low-quality, you can either delete or consolidate them.
Repurpose Evergreen Content
While time-sensitive content may need to be removed, evergreen content can be repurposed or updated. During your content audit, this is a crucial aspect to consider. As you are going through your audit, take this into consideration. Evergreen content can stay relevant and valuable for a long time, but it might need to be refreshed or repurposed periodically. If you do remove old, time-sensitive content from your website, remember to implement 301 redirects so you don’t lose any backlinks.
Monitor Your Search Engine Rankings
After you take the steps to analyze and clean up your content, you must monitor your search engine rankings. You want to ensure that the changes made to your website do not negatively impact your SEO. After a content cleanup, you must watch Google Analytics closely to look for declines in traffic and conversions. If you notice consistent decreases, you may need to reevaluate your changes. However, it is important to remember that your rankings may take some time to stabilize.