Google: Pruning Content Is Not Safe; Instead Make It Better

Gary Illyes from Google said at the State of Search conference that from a Google perspective, pruning content is not a safe tactic for improving your overall site quality. He added that it is better to improve pages on your site instead of just pruning the content and noindexing them.

A typical tactic after being hit by a quality update or Panda update, is to remove access from Google to crawl your thinner, lower value content. Many people 404, noindex, or block the content from Google with hopes Google will rank the other pages on the site higher.

Heck, Gary Illyes said in 2015 that this is a tactic you can use. But I guess things change...

Here are some tweets with the coverage:

#StateofSearch @methode from a Google perspective, pruning content is not a safe tactic.

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) October 10, 2017

It is better to improve pages instead of just noindexing them. Via @methode #StateofSearch

— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) October 10, 2017

Of course, sometimes it is not possible with your resources to improve all your low quality content. Then you need to make a decision. Do you improve some of it or remove all of it?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.