Ch. 10: I Deleted 38% of My Site and Traffic Went Up

Ch. 10: I Deleted 38% of My Site and Traffic Went Up

My fishing-gear site had 240 published posts and was stuck at 40,000 sessions for months. On a hunch I pulled the bottom performers: 91 posts had earned under 5 clicks each in 90 days.

Scary move, but I noindexed 68 of them and 301'd 23 into stronger relatives. That's 38% of the site gone from the index in one afternoon. My VA thought I'd lost it.

Six weeks later: sessions climbed to 51,000. The surviving pages crawled more often (I watched it in the logs) and several jumped 3-5 positions. Removing the dead weight raised the site's average quality signal.

Revenue went from $1,400 to $2,050/mo on fewer total pages.

Lesson banked: Google budgets crawl and trust per site — 90 dead posts don't just earn nothing, they drag down the pages that do work.