My pruning playbook: which posts to delete

My pruning playbook: which posts to delete

Month 16, my site had 140 posts and traffic had plateaued. Counterintuitive fix: I deleted 38 of them and traffic went UP 22%. Here's the exact decision tree.

— Export every URL with its last-12-month clicks and impressions from Search Console
— Bucket 1 — zero clicks AND zero impressions in 12 months: these are dead weight dragging site quality. Candidates to cut
— Before deleting, ask: can this be MERGED into a stronger post? Three thin 'pothos' posts became one great one (301 the old URLs)
— Bucket 2 — clicks but wrong audience (no buyer path): keep but de-prioritize
— Anything getting even 5 clicks a month: keep, it's a signal
— For true deletes with backlinks: 301 to the closest relevant post, never to the homepage
— Log every URL and where it redirected

I merged 14 posts, 301'd 9, deleted 15 truly worthless ones. Six weeks later the SURVIVING posts rose — Google reallocated crawl and trust to my good content. Traffic 9k to 11k.

The setback: I hard-deleted 3 posts that had real backlinks pointing at them, lost that equity. Should have 301'd. Learned it the hard way.

The takeaway: More posts isn't more traffic. Audit by 12-month clicks, merge what you can, 301 the rest — a leaner site often ranks the survivors higher.