Content pruning: Clear clutter, improve rankings, engage visitors

There are plenty of contexts in which “more” doesn’t necessarily equal “better.” Content marketing is one of them. 

To be a bit more specific, I’ve had lots of discovery conversations in which digital leaders admit that they’ve lost track of what content they have live across markets. One retail brand I worked with had over 200,000 outdated pages in its digital ecosystem — and that clutter was not only undermining customer trust in the brand but its search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

The point is, if your digital ecosystem is starting to accumulate irrelevant, inaccurate, duplicate, or thin content, chances are both your users and Google will notice. 

So, what’s the best way to deal with that content — and without disrupting your wider digital experience or your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? The answer: content pruning.

In this post, we’ll discuss the content pruning process, why it matters, and how Contentful can make it simpler and more efficient.

Let’s dive in.

What is content pruning?

Content pruning is the process of reviewing, updating, or deleting content to maintain or improve the overall digital experience of your website or app, increase organic traffic, and strengthen SEO.

There’s an obvious comparison to be made here: We prune content for the same reason that we prune gardens. Ecosystems grow and change organically: weeds can choke off resources, branches can block sunlight, and certain species are seasonal — and good gardeners know when and how to intervene to realign those spaces. 

Like real ecosystems, digital ecosystems grow as teams publish blog posts, product pages, event listings, author profiles, location pages, and whatever else they need to execute their content strategies. That growth can be positive for SEO and the content experience: more content creates more opportunities to connect with audiences. But it can also have drawbacks: A larger digital footprint makes quality control harder, and increases the potential for content chaos by adding to the content governance burden. 

Content also (inevitably) degrades over the course of its lifecycle which might mean its accuracy and alignment with business objectives shifts. That manifests in a number of ways, including inaccurate product descriptions, inconsistent messaging, and link rot. In a recent study, for example, Ahrefs found that over 65% of backlinks rotted over the course of nine years, with a further 7% being lost to other issues.  

These aren’t just problems for customers interacting with your content, they also affect the way that search engine crawlers treat your website. 

Key red flags that indicate your content needs pruning include:

• Declining site traffic or page impressions.

• Lower search visibility or rankings.

• High bounce rates with low engagement.

• Large volumes of duplicate or overlapping content.

• Broken internal and external links.

• Outdated information.

Finding balance

Pruning isn’t an exercise in the blanket removal of existing content — even older pieces of content could hold significant value and might be driving organic traffic to your site thanks to keywords and active backlinks. At the same time, however, those content pieces might display old logos, old information, irrelevant keywords, or duplicate text, which undermine their SEO value and prevent crawler bots from finding pages that fulfil their users' search intent efficiently. 

With that in mind, pruning is about balancing the identification of content that should be deleted, with content that could be updated efficiently, and content that could be merged with other content.

While smaller brands might have a relatively straightforward pruning process, the job gets more complicated for multi-brand organizations with bigger digital footprints, or those that have to manage content in multiple languages. In fact, one complaint that I hear a lot from these types of companies is that the hardest part of pruning isn’t the identification of poor content, but aligning global and regional teams around what older content needs to stay, what needs to go, and what needs to be rewritten.  

In these contexts, governance becomes critical. Without it, pruning projects can easily get bogged down in endless debates, and, ultimately, stall. 

How pruning helps 

We’ve talked about why you might need to prune your content, but what are the practical benefits?

Search visibility

Google and other search engines prioritize quality and relevance. If your site is cluttered with outdated or low-quality content, engines may deprioritize it and drop it down SERP rankings. By removing duplicates, tightening copy, verifying accuracy, and adding relevant keywords, you can boost visibility significantly. 

Remember: Content visibility isn’t just about conventional search anymore. In the era of generative AI (GenAI), platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini look for fresh, relevant, accurate content to surface in their outputs, with research suggesting that up to 65% of all AI search-bot hits go to content updated in the last 12 months. That trend means generative engine optimization (GEO) should be a pruning priority. 

Business solutions

From a solutions perspective, pruning strengthens governance, reduces compliance risk, and enables personalization. Clean content models can help you roll campaigns out faster, while also helping writers, designers, editors, and marketers adopt and use your tools, such as Contentful Studio and Contentful Personalization more easily.

User experience

Outdated, inaccurate, or duplicate content frustrates visitors and erodes trust. By removing clutter, pruning makes navigation easier, serves to highlight important pages, and improves the consistency of brand voice and messaging — which typically means better engagement, lower bounce rates, and higher conversions.

Duplication and cannibalization

When your site has multiple pages targeting the same keywords or the same topics, they’re essentially competing against each other for the attention of search and GenAI engines. Keyword cannibalization and duplication hurts SERP rankings (and confuses visitors) so it’s important to stay on top of the problem by deleting or removing the necessary content.

Search engine effort

Search engines have limited time and resources to crawl your site and don’t like wasting that “crawl budget” on irrelevant content — especially if that content is hidden amidst thousands of pages. Pruning increases the value of your content by making it easier to crawl and more visible, and, therefore, more likely that search and GenAI engines will dedicate their crawl budgets to it.

Backlink value

Low-quality pages dilute the SEO value of backlinks. Therefore, pruning lower quality pages from your ecosystem will concentrate backlinks on more important pages, which increases those pages’ visibility and value to search and GenAI engines, not to mention the experience of incoming visitors. 

The pruning process

Here’s a framework for approaching your pruning process:

Audit content

Going in blind to pruning isn’t an option: You need to understand where your digital ecosystem needs attention. You can use analytics tools to perform a sitewide content audit to identify the red flags listed above, and then develop specific SEO objectives.

Verify issues

You’ll need to establish that low-performing content issues are not the result of some underlying backend technical issue, such as slow rendering or incompatibility. It may be necessary to work in collaboration with your development team during the pruning process and, where SEO issues are verified as content-related, you can move forward with the relevant editorial measures.

Take action

Once you’ve identified issues, you’ll need to decide what action to take to resolve them. On that note, here’s the “4C” framework that I share with Contentful customers to support their pruning processes.

• Check: Audit and tag content by relevance, freshness, and performance.

• Curate: Refresh and update high-value assets so they stay aligned with business goals.

• Consolidate: Merge duplicate or overlapping entries to strengthen authority and improve crawl efficiency.

• Cut: Retire or redirect obsolete content, freeing up both customer journeys and crawl budgets.

In Contentful, each of these steps is easier to execute thanks to structured content, tagging, and AI-powered automation — but we’ll get to that.

Measure impact

Following pruning, it’s time to go back to the analytics to gauge improvements to SERP rankings and other critical SEO metrics. The data you gather will be useful for future pruning efforts. 

Content pruning benefits with Contentful

If you’re worried that pruning is going to become an administrative slog or a blocker for more value-adding, creative work, then bear in mind that the right tech stack makes all the difference when it comes to pruning efficiency.

That’s where the inherent flexibility of Contentful makes the difference. 

When I demo Contentful to customers, what surprises them most often is just how quickly they can take action without having to loop in developers or impose disruption or downtime on their wider system. That’s usually the moment when pruning stops feeling like a chore, and more like an opportunity.

But how does Contentful create that opportunity?

Structured content

Contentful breaks content down into its smallest structural components (headers, text, images, etc.). Structuring makes it easier to update, merge, or delete content in a highly targeted way: You can adjust a blog headline, for example, quickly, easily, and independently of the wider article.

Omnichannel scope

In Contentful, content is stored in a central location, and published across all channels simultaneously. That means you only need to prune content once, and the changes you make will be implemented across all instances of that content: website, app, in-store display, and so on. 

Content tagging

The Contentful platform offers easy-to-use, native tagging tools, which enable users to filter content by age, topic, audience and other relevant factors, in order to surface problematic content in seconds and streamline the pruning process. For added efficiency, users can automate content tagging to accelerate high volume content pruning.

AI automation

Built into the Contentful Platform, AI Actions enables content teams to automate vital pruning tasks at scale. The AI Actions feature includes automations for metadata tagging, image tagging, blog post rewrites, keyword optimization, FAQ generation, and more. 

Wrapping up

Whatever the size of your current digital footprint, pruning isn’t a nice-to-have, if-there’s-time, SEO luxury. It should be a cornerstone of your content management strategy. 

It’s not a process that needs to take place every week, and doesn’t necessarily require intensive effort, but by monitoring performance and scheduling regular audits, you’ll ensure your content stays up to date and aligned with your objectives over the long term. There’s value to pruning beyond SEO performance too, not least improving visitor experiences, loyalty, and engagement. 

And remember: There’s no need to struggle through your pruning process. The Contentful Platform makes it easier and faster to integrate pruning with content workflows by putting powerful SEO tools at the fingertips of content teams, and freeing those teams to work without the need for developer support. 

You can explore our platform’s features for yourself, check out the full range of AI Actions demos, or drop a line to the sales team to discuss your next step.

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