Ch. 13: I Deleted 30% of My Site and Traffic Went Up

Ch. 13: I Deleted 30% of My Site and Traffic Went Up

My travel-gear site had 140 posts and felt impressive. It also felt stuck — 24k sessions for nine months straight. I pulled GSC data and sorted by clicks over 90 days.

The number that stung: 44 posts had earned 0 clicks. Another 19 had under 5. Sixty-three pages — 45% of the site — were doing nothing but diluting my crawl budget and average quality.

I noindexed the 30 worst with no salvage path and consolidated 13 near-duplicates into 5 stronger posts. I held my breath.

Six weeks later sessions hit 31k. The remaining content got crawled more often, and the sitewide quality signal clearly improved — even untouched pages rose 2-4 positions.

Lesson banked: a smaller site of all-strong pages beats a big one carrying dead weight. Zero-click pages aren't neutral — they're an anchor.