We Eliminated 84 Low-quality Messages: Here's What Happened

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After reading a number of articles about pruning site content – ​​mostly dealing with e-commerce sites – we wanted to run our own blog pruning test. When I say "pruning", I mean removing pages that have few or no links, which do not generate traffic/conversions and which receive very few visits.If you haven't read Everett Sizemore's post on Moz about pruning e-commerce sites and results, it's a journey and you should stop reading this and go there first.The test:Most Seer team members don't know this, but 84 posts disappeared from our site a few weeks ago.Why? Based on data from pruning studies of e-commerce sites, we've learned that some sites can improve rankings and traffic for remaining, valuable pages. It is called "pruning" because it is very similar to a tree benefiting from the pruning of Acheter une base de données diseased or dead limbs.What we removed:Duplicate Pages – Seer's blog generated duplicate pages at some point after our redesign a few years ago. These were pages that ended in “-2”. There were 14 of these pages that had no links and were 100% duplicates. Faded away. Want to see one of them? ( We had a number of posts that were completely off topic. We found many just by reading the URLs. Selling your MySpace page? Back when Seer practiced less targeted link building, it was something we could post on the blog. How does this speak for Seer today? It's not at all. While it's important to know where we came from and we're happy to be transparent about old posts we've removed, some topics simply don't belong anymore. There were also a number of broken frames, which brings us to point 3.70 posts were completely off topic or had all images broken. These pages generated little traffic, had higher than average bounce rates, and simply had a poor user experience. Between the broken images and the elevated formatting, these were thrown away.Overall, we removed about 9% of total blog posts.