Content-pruning cases: cutting pages that lifted traffic

Content-pruning cases: cutting pages that lifted traffic

Six teams that deleted their way up. Counterintuitive, measured, sourced. Forward to your content lead.

— 1. A SaaS pruned 40% of thin blog posts — consolidated into pillars; organic traffic rose 19% in 3 months as crawl budget concentrated. Read if your blog is bloated.
— 2. A marketplace's doorway-page cull — killed 12,000 near-duplicate location pages flagged by an audit; recovered from a quality demotion in one update cycle. Essential if you ran programmatic too hard.
— 3. A media co's internal-linking pass — added contextual links from high-authority pages to thin ones; targeted pages climbed an average 6 positions. The link-flow logic is the takeaway.
— 4. A B2B's cannibalization merge — two pages fighting for one query, merged into one, rankings went page-2 to position 4. Skip if you don't have duplicates.
— 5. A DTC's refresh-vs-rewrite test — refreshing dates and stats beat full rewrites on ROI for 70% of decaying posts. The triage rubric is reusable.
— 6. An agency's index-bloat fix — noindexed filter/tag pages, crawl stats improved, key pages got crawled 2x more often. The robots logic is worth the click.

That's the stack for this week. Forward to a teammate.