Rosebushes, and other flowering plants, often become “stuck.” They grow until they get to a certain point, then it seems the blooms can get no bigger. What do you do if you want to encourage your roses to bloom bigger and brighter? You prune the bush. A talented gardener knows just the right branches and areas to cut back that will help the plant grow stronger and more beautiful.
When you are trying to build the traffic to your webpage, pruning can also be a great strategy. It’s easy to keep adding and adding more content to your page because you think it will boost your ratings with the major search engines. However, there are some types of content that actually wind up making your page worse—not just quality-wise, but also in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. If you are ready to make a change for the better, consider pruning the following types of content from your page—you may be impressed by how beautifully your page winds up blooming.
- Duplicate Content – If you are using content on your page that you have borrowed from another source, or the content was original to you but it has been republished elsewhere, it may make sense to remove it from your page. If the latter is the case, you can look into getting the other site owner to remove the page, but it is often easier to either remove the content or hire a writer to rewrite it so that it is original and will not hurt you in the eyes of the search engine algorithms.
- Low Quality Content – You may decide to save money by hiring someone other than professional content writers to create content for your page. While you may fill your page with content, the quality is often very low. When you fill your page with low-quality content, you risk having your page look bad to readers, and you do not usually get any benefit from the search engines either.
- Outdated Content – You may have written an article that was chock full of great information and interesting to your readers, too. However, if you wrote this piece 10 years ago, you may find that the document is now out of date. You do not want to leave content that is out of date on your page as it can be quite confusing to your readers and brings down the authoritativeness of your website.
As you can see, there are some cases where you will want to remove content from your page. Remember to prune your site regularly, and you will wind up with a page that is enjoyable to read and brings in new visitors from the search engines.
Tracy S is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
