Should I Delete Outdated Pages on My Website?
As a digital marketing agency in Kitchener-Waterloo, we often have clients who ask us to delete outdated content on their website. More often than not, we advise these clients to keep the content, even if it is outdated.
While removing irrelevant content can certainly have its benefits, it can also have a negative impact on your traffic and page rankings if you’re not careful.
We wrote this article to help you understand the fine line between content deletion being useful and content deletion being harmful. Keep reading to learn the implications of deleting old website content — plus a better alternative that turns dead pages back into organic traffic drivers.
Why Delete Outdated Content?
Google can tell when your content is outdated or irrelevant. When more topical, relevant pieces of content come out from your competitors, it will often be prioritized. This is how Google keeps their search engine fresh and up-to-date.
This might prompt you to start deleting outdated content, making sure all that’s left is relevant, up-to-date, and high-quality.
Yes, deleting outdated content can help you in some ways. Mainly, it can improve user experience and potentially help your site’s SEO by reducing crawl waste. Google’s search engine bots can only crawl so many pages at one time, so removing some unnecessary content in favour of giving Google more high-quality content to crawl isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
However, it also can backfire if you’re not mindful of what you’re deleting.
Why You Shouldn’t Delete Outdated Website Content
While there are some pros to deleting website content, there are also advantages in keeping the content.
You Lose Organic Traffic
Even if a page is outdated, it could still continue to bring organic traffic to your site.
Imagine you delete 20 outdated pages which were only bringing in 10 clicks every 3 months. For most websites, 10 clicks is nothing noteworthy, especially when there are other pages that bring 100+ clicks.
But let’s put into perspective just how much traffic you’d be losing by deleting these pages:
10 clicks x 20 pages = 200 clicks every 3 months
200 clicks per quarter x 4 quarters = 800 clicks per year
Now that we’ve actually done the math, we know that that’s a decent chunk of traffic you’re losing. Is the need for a more topical website worth losing 800 organic traffic per year?
You Lose Backlinks
When a website with a domain other than yours links one of your pages, that becomes a backlink. For Google, backlinks are very powerful and important. They signal to Google that you’re an authoritative source that people trust, improving your website’s credibility and page ranking.
We’ve seen website owners delete outdated content that made up a good chunk of their backlinks. This does more harm than good.
When you delete that content, those backlinks are gone too, along with the credibility Google gave you as a result. Losing backlinks is definitely a risk, especially if the page used to generate high traffic.
If you don’t know what backlinks your website has, there are various backlink checkers available online for free.
Past Posts Build Authority
One of the ways Google ranks content is through your website’s authority and expertise. We’ve already covered how backlinks can impact your authoritativeness, but your website’s history also has an influence on how Google sees you.
Active websites that carry older pieces of content indicate years of experience. While not as impactful as backlinks, this still tells Google that you have significant expertise and authority over the topics you cover.
Alternatives to Deleting Outdated Content
A strategy we often use for out-of-date content is content updates.
How to Update Website Content
Content updates enable you to keep historical content while still maintaining relevancy, value, and accuracy. After an update, even the most outdated pages can become organic traffic drivers. Here’s quick advice on how to update outdated website content:
Find outdated pages on your website that have stopped driving traffic.
Look up the key phrase to see what is now ranking for it, and make a note of what content competitor pages have that your own page is missing.
Use a keyword tracking tool to see what other related keywords/key phrases have popped up.
Start by updating any irrelevant or inaccurate information, such as dates, outdated policies, broken backlinks.etc
Now, go in and update the content based on what your competitors have included and what other related queries have popped up since you initially published the page.
Once you’ve updated the page, go to Google Search Console and resubmit the page for indexing. This will indicate to Google that the page has been changed and needs to be reevaluated.
If you would like a more in-depth tutorial into the content update process, or just need someone to take over entirely, we can help! Let’s discuss your goals and how content updates can make a difference for your site.
When Deleting Website Content is Okay
In our professional opinion, you should only delete website pages that meet all these requirements:
The page has no organic traffic
The page has no backlinks
The page is no longer valuable or accurate
The page cannot be updated or repurposed
The page doesn’t align with your core content strategy
