Ways Removing Outdated Content Saves Your Website

What Is Outdated Content?

Outdated content on any specific page of a website is the one that’s not accurate, does not provide value, and does not reflect the current positioning of your brand.

Below are some of the examples showing how your content can be outdated:

• Discontinuity in product or services pages
• Helpful content such as guides or advice that is outdated
• Content that’s linked to a due date – like a project timeline or job ad
• Content that is irrelevant to the products or services your business offers
• Mentions of employees who no longer work for you

Apart from the above, any content that is not relevant, is not fresh, or has lost value, should be removed or updated.

Why Remove Outdated Content?

The focus of major search engines like Google is to provide internet users with content that’s fresh, relevant, and authoritative.

This is the main reason why content that is value-driven and has been recently published on a website ranks higher than older content.

Any content that Google deems low quality is one that has meaningless information on a particular subject. Such inaccurate or meaningless content is called outdated content.

The more low-quality content that is present on a site, the less authoritative a site will seem to the search engine. Thus, it will be harder and harder for such a site to rank in the SERPs (search engine results page).

By removing irrelevant content with the help of Removify, especially from a big website (say 8K pages plus), you increase the website’s individual pages’ chances of ranking on the search engine. The more you refine and compress the content by deleting irrelevant stuff, the more you help Google to focus on pages you care about the most.

Big Reasons You Should Remove Outdated Content

Discontinued Products that Aren’t Coming Back

You need to pick discontinued product pages and show the same types of products for a certain time span. You will do this to gain the full benefit of having products showing on the site until the new range of products takes over.

Doing so does not mean that you have to keep such product pages live forever. Every product should be on an expiry period – no matter if a year has gone by and it’s being discontinued to capture the traffic that may be available for both products.

Service Offering Has Changed, But Site Content Has Not

Services being offered by a business are always changing. However, it’s equally essential you update the content of your site. This way, you make the content and offering perfectly aligned to gain the trust of customers and the search engine.

If users on the internet see that your content is not aligned with what your business actually offers, then the following two outcomes may occur.

• They are going to like what you are offering on your business website. Eventually, they will give you a phone call, just to find out that you no more offer the kind of service the site claim.
• The outdated information gives no description of the new range of your services – which does not seem to fit customer needs.