Content Pruning Suggestions

[FootballFanatic]

Hi Guys,

Over the years I have developed a website that now has over 30k Unique wordpress posts that quickly fall out of being topical within a few days due to the nature of football.

I write previews and betting tips for upcoming matches. Over the years as I have covered the same matches and WordPress is duplicating on URLs now. I really don't want to have to remove my previous tips as these can be seen as a past record so my profit/lost record can be accounted for.

Is content pruning worth it? Deleting tips IMO is a last resort but something I will consider if suggested to.

 

[Community]

Welcome to the forum,

Pruning and refining old, out dated and "thin" content can be hugely beneficial. However when doing so in my opinion its got to be with good reason.

If the content is "thin", in other words adds very little value, isn't very many words long and doesn't really attract any traffic then its 100% worth removing and redirecting those old posts to new relevant ones.

If the content is of reasonable length and is completely unique it maybe worth refactoring or repurposing. Using date/year based titles can help searches especially in Football and sports can be a huge drive in traffic. For example

Manchester United vs Tottenham November 2018 - Gives clear indication for historical searches once that year has passed which often outweighs searches based on the day of the match.

With tips, It really depends on what they are like, how they are structured, what content length they are and again if they get traffic. It maybe an option to create glossary pages which either link to all these tips for easy reading, or if able to combining many of them into pages of content nicely structured and redirecting old/combined posts.

If your content is less than 500 words on each post or isnt unique, it will be worth pruning but the sure fire way as to whats worth doing is going through your analytics and webmaster tools/search console , assessing popular pages which have traffic and on the flip side those that have no traffic and poor bounce rates.

To give you an example a prune campaign we recently done for a client. ( although this was on a forum rather than blog you get the idea).

We removed over 400,000 pages/threads from a 1.2 million thread forum, they had terrible bounce rates and alot of content was of low quality or added very little value, we redirected a large proportion of threads which desirable metrics, also removing profiles( because they are thin, duplicated content for the most part ), with in a matter of months we saw traffic double.....after nearly 3 years in a slow decline.

It's not a for the faint hearted thats for sure, its time consuming and it certainly isnt a delete and forget senario, redirects and reasons for deletion need to be thought about properly.

 

[Happy Koala]

if the old pages are not getting any traffic then you should get rid of them, they are wasting space and taking up a valuable URL name by the sounds of it