Have you ever wondered what impact deleting or consolidating older content could have on your overall SEO? According to SEO blogger Nick Stamoulis, an innocent spring content cleaning can positively tank your page rankings if done incorrectly.
In a recent blog post titled, Can Removing and Consolidating Your Content Hurt Your SEO?, Stamoulis offers webmasters some rock solid tips for keeping SEO in tact during major content shifts. Here’s are a few of his key thoughts on the subject.
Consolidation Impacts Trust
For all its many flaws, Google is a company that respects its elders. Quality content that’s been aged, and linked, properly is as good as gold to Google search bots. So it makes sense that pulling down that content negatively impacts your overall SEO efforts.
In many ways, consolidating content is like pulling down a reliable landmark that pointing towards quality content.
If you really must pull down this type of content, Stamoulis recommends replacing it with similar high quality content that’s linked to other aged content. This isn’t a one-for-one replacement, but it will definitely help mitigate SEO damage.
301 Redirects
Besides losing authority and trust, deleting content can shoot giant holes in your overall link building efforts. Remember, no matter what you do with a page, search bots will still visit that URL from other pages. Unless you’ve given them a detour, in the form of a 301 redirect, all that valuable link juice will be gone for good.
This technique also insures that your new content will come into the world with legitimate links.
Consolidation Can Kill Conversion
Every piece of content on your sites is like a baited hook dangling in the water, enticing players from every corner of the Web. Cutting and consolidating content takes those hooks out of the water.
A continuous stream of quality content is the best possible bait you’ve got for catching and converting players. The more content you’ve got floating out there in cyberspace, the better off you’ll be.
Finally
This doesn’t mean you should hang on to low quality content; the kind that’s probably dragging down your site anyways. What Stamoulis is suggesting is judicious cutting and consolidation.
If you’re cutting for cutting’s sake, you’re probably doing more harm than good.
What precautions do you take to make certain that consolidating or deleting old content doesn’t hurt your overall SEO? Share your tips and tricks in the comments section below.