SEO tactics change constantly. What worked three years ago might very well not work now. In fact, what worked well last year might not even work well this year. However, it’s hard to go wrong with good practice. Most of the changes in SEO are aimed at weeding out bad practice. While big companies like Google are weeding out bad practice, you can make the most of your site by pruning bad – or at least, not good – content.
Why does it matter?
Changes introduced by Google and other search engines mean that content is now checked for quality and not just quantity. This means that if you still have a lot of old content on your site that you and your web company have forgotten about, it could be affecting your search rankings. Some pages might have duplicate content, some might have information that is obsolete, and other pages might simply suffer from not having enough content.
You don’t want any of these pages indexed because they will cause your site to appear lower in the search rankings. The criteria for being penalised has changed to counter the tricks some companies tried to use to beat the search engines. Even perfectly good pages can be penalised if they are out of date or low on content.
What should I do?
Ideally, you need to ask an expert. A firm such as Cheltenham web design company www.ma-design.biz could go through your website using a tool such as Google’s Webmaster Tools to analyse which pages are working well and which pages need to go. They would also look at rewriting or redesigning pages that were underperforming.
Some pages will need to be removed altogether, and others will just need to be removed from Google’s index. If a page has mainly manufacturer-supplied descriptions of products, for example, you don’t want it indexed by Google, even if you don’t want to lose it completely. Pruning your site can reap tremendous rewards.
Content counts
The quality of the content on your site is now more important than just the quantity of content on your site. It will take time to build quality content, and while you do that, you should also be removing the content that is not helping your business any more.