Addition By Subtraction: How Deleting Content Can Boost Your Search Performance

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Alright! Let’s dive into today’s topic.

In previous editions, I talked about GeeksforGeeks and DMarge, two websites that were hit hard in Google Search. GeeksforGeeks was completely thrown out of the index, while DMarge saw a significant drop in traffic. Both tried the same remedy: removing content.

So… did it work?
Is deleting content actually a good strategy for recovering visibility?

Yes… and no.

For GeeksforGeeks, removing irrelevant or low-value content did help.
For DMarge, the same approach did not move the needle.

Why the different outcomes?

Because SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Content pruning can absolutely be the right move, but only under the right conditions.

Want to know when deleting content helps, and when it can make things worse?

Read on!

TL;DR

• There are two reasons removing content from your website can help improve your performance, tightening your topical authority and removing low quality content.
• If your content is high quality, and your website is in a naturally wide-spread niche like lifestyle, pruning content is not a good idea, and won't help you much.
• Geeks for Geeks website recovered because their content was branching outside of their main topic.
• DMarge did not recover, because they're a lifestyle website and having a variety of topics is natural.
• Google leaks from last year show two attributes that are used to measure a website's topical authority and someone is creating a tool to visualize that, so scroll to learn more!
  

Why remove content?

I think topical authority and helpful content are the two main reasons people even consider removing content from their websites. Let me break that down for you:

Helpful Content

Is your content genuinely high-quality? Does it provide unique value, real insights, and information users can’t get everywhere else, regardless of whether it was written by a human, AI, or a hybrid workflow?

Basically, if you create content that:

• Is original
• Provides value to the user
• Is not just summarized or paraphrased from another source(s)
• And put enough effort into it

Your content is good to go!

Topical Authority

Is your website focused on a clear subject area, or are you branching out into content that feels irrelevant or off-topic? Google increasingly expects websites to have a strong, coherent topical footprint, especially after the Helpful Content updates.

Remember last year's Google leaks. I don't think we gave this leak enough attention in the industry (myself included) it was trending for a bit, and then we kinda collectively moved one while there was still so much to dig into.

Any ways! The leaked documents from Google's Content Warehouse API showed a number of internal attributes and systems, including siteFocusScore and a related metric, siteRadius.These signals are used to mathematically evaluate a site's expertise and contextual relevance. 

• siteFocusScore: This score measures the thematic precision of a site's entire content library. A higher score indicates a website that focuses intently on a well-defined niche, signaling deep expertise to Google's systems.
• siteRadius: This metric works in tandem with siteFocusScore and measures how much a specific page's content deviates from the site's overall core theme. Content that strays too far from the main topic can negatively impact ranking potential.
• Topical Authority: The existence of these metrics provides strong evidence that "topical authority" is not an abstract concept but a measurable, mathematical signal. Google uses entity annotations and site embeddings to understand the semantic meaning and core focus areas of a website. 

This information, in addition to my personal experience (and I'm sure others have seen it) removing irrelevant content from your website will give your website's overall performance a boost.

I really like what Stefan Mustieles shared. He built a tool (coming out later this week, so give him a follow) that shows how scattered away your content is from your main topic. i don't know how this is not all over the place, but just goes to show how many great content goes unnoticed on LinkedIn. Right?

To prune or not to prune, that is the question 😄

In the cases of DMarge and GeeksforGeeks, both sites actually had good quality content. Their issue wasn’t the quality, their visibility drop came from “not sticking to their niche” or so they thought.

But the nuance here matters, and can show when pruning makes sense and when not. Let's have a closer look, shall we?

GeeksforGeeks

They did have areas that drifted outside their core technical domain. They are a website that teaches technical concepts and how to code, and they started writing about topics like "andrew tate networth".... this is like you coming to my website and finding among my SEO topics a blog about "how to crochet a scarf".... really?

DMarge

DMarge, on the other hand, is a lifestyle publication, which by definition can legitimately cover a wide range of topics. Their breadth isn’t a weakness; it’s the nature of the category.

But in an attempt to “narrow their niche,” they removed entire categories of content. And unlike GeeksforGeeks, this pruning didn’t help them recover. In fact, if you ask me, they were cutting out helpful content, content that was performing, ranking, or at least providing value.

So instead of tightening their topical authority around less topics, they stepped into a zero-sum game:
They might have been gaining some traction from improvements elsewhere, but they were simultaneously losing traffic because they deleted useful pages. Any recovery signals could have been canceled out by the self-inflicted loss.

So while both websites believed the problem was topical dilution, only one of them actually fit the scenario where pruning content made sense.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

From my experience, there are two ways your website can get a sudden boost in search performance:

• removing a lot of content in a short amount of time.
• publishing a lot of content in a short amount of time (if you get a boost in this case, it may or may not last depending on your content quality).

Understanding the levers we have in SEO, and when they work and when they don't is essential. SEO is not a one size fits all. That's why pruning worked for Geeks for Geeks but not for DMarge.

That's that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.