Sure, content is king but when you have a site chocked full of thousands upon thousands of pages of content, can it be too much?
Does too much content dilute the powerful incoming links which you have earned into miniscule citations? Or is this a navigation issue?
John Scott has an interesting case study of how removing non-performing content can supercharge your existing material and lead to increased search engine referrals :
About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I went through the list and checked anything that might be remotely worthwhile.
And I did not delete the threads – I simply moved them to a private, hidden, admin-access-only forum.
Within a couple weeks, I started to see the remaining pages performing much better. Within two weeks, search engine referrals were up 7,000 per day.
John’s theory?
- Adding non-performing content to a website will actually hurt your search engine visibility
- Non-performing content diluties and wastes link weight on non-performing pages.
- By removing tens of thousands of non-performing pages, you conserve and direct that link weight and focus it on performing pages
- Doing so increases the ranking of performing pages in SERPs.
More at Excess pages polluting your website?
