Could old content or landing pages be hurting your ranking? Well, old content, in general, could be hurting your website’s traffic and ranking in search engines. There are a couple of different reasons why this could be happening, and one of them pertains to old, outdated pages of content that no longer serve their purpose. 

Whether it is an old product that has now sold out, or expired content and pages if there isn’t a need to maintain or continue to update this page’s content, get rid of it. 

This could be leading to the tell-tale question companies ask themselves, “why is my website traffic dropping?” Now, it isn’t all thanks to outdated content or landing pages, but it doesn’t help the situation. 

This is how your old content and landing pages could be hurting your ranking. 

Why is my website traffic dropping? 

There are about 16 different reasons that your website’s ranking could be dropping and search traffic will contribute to this as well. 

While exploring those 16 different reasons, how do you know when to keep content versus annex it? 

When you should keep old content 

Ever notice that a blog from three years ago is ranking? Or a service page that was struggling is now bringing in a significant amount of new traffic? While this content is older and took some time to start bringing in traffic, this is a moment when you should keep old content. 

While it might seem as if it isn’t relevant anymore, the fact is, it has now turned into a needed service or product, or for blogs, evergreen content. 

When it comes to your landing page, if the service is still relevant and the content is a bit older, update it! This can include keywords, content, and even imagery. The same goes for any older content that is relevant and suddenly ranking. 

When you should delete old content

Our digital marketing Dallas experts highly recommend never “deleting” content, but there are moments when this could work out for the best. However, removing old or irrelevant content could help with ranking because a poor-quality page has been removed and no longer will be indexed. 

If you apply these scenarios to the strategy, overall, it shouldn’t continue to hinder the website ranking. 

• Remove if it has never gotten or continues to not bring in traffic

• It doesn’t have backlinks

• It’s so old, no one will miss it, and it isn’t worth updating

How to properly remove old content and not lose ranking 

When you remove content, the path will break, and the page will display a 404 error. A 404 page is a way to tell users, “hey, we have taken this down,” or “find the new page.” A 404 page itself isn’t necessarily bad, but it will affect any other pages that were linking to this shut-down page. 

Does this page have internal backlinks? What about some external pages? It is important to review this before completely deleting the page. 

A great option instead is to use a 301 redirect that links to the new page. This means a redirect to a blog or other page that is still relevant to the previous page. 

Finally, our digital marketing Dallas experts recommend to our clients to “close” the page. This is a feature available to all of our clients who use ExpressionEngine. 

Take a page from HubSpot’s book on how they effectively removed over 3,000 pages of content from their website. 

But, please note with this, that HubSpot is a massive website, and for smaller to large companies, this could affect their ranking in different ways. 

Contact us! 

Our experts provide website design and development and continue on to digital marketing efforts. To speak with someone on our team, contact us today.