• Menu
  • Skip to right header navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Spectrum Group Online

Decisions Made with Data.

  • What We Do
    • SEO
      • White Hat SEO
      • Local SEO
      • Schema for Advanced SEO
      • Website SEO Audit
      • Link Building
      • Penalty Recovery
    • Google Analytics Services
      • Google Analytics Audit
    • Pay Per Click
      • Google Ads
      • Bing Ads
    • Content Marketing
    • Social Media
    • WordPress
      • WordPress Websites
      • WordPress Maintenance
  • Pricing
    • Our Pricing
    • PPC Pricing
    • Brand-Only PPC
  • Case Studies
    • Testimonials
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Upcoming Events
    • Certifications
    • Tools We Use
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • What We Do
    • SEO
      • White Hat SEO
      • Local SEO
      • Schema for Advanced SEO
      • Website SEO Audit
      • Link Building
      • Penalty Recovery
    • Google Analytics Services
      • Google Analytics Audit
    • Pay Per Click
      • Google Ads
      • Bing Ads
    • Content Marketing
    • Social Media
    • WordPress
      • WordPress Websites
      • WordPress Maintenance
  • Pricing
    • Our Pricing
    • PPC Pricing
    • Brand-Only PPC
  • Case Studies
    • Testimonials
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Upcoming Events
    • Certifications
    • Tools We Use
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Content / Remove or Improve – What to Do With Low-Quality Content?

Remove or Improve – What to Do With Low-Quality Content?

Updated December 3, 2021

November 13, 2018 //  by Massimo Paolini//  Leave a Comment

https://www. in a search engine

The Unfinished Manuscript

In an ideal world, all of the content on your website is going to be high quality, Pulitzer winning prose. However, in the real world, this might not be the case. You might have inherited a blog with poorly written content. Or a website with numerous pages that were written a long time ago, and as such, are not properly optimized for the search engines of today. So, what do you do with this low-quality content? Throw it in the trash? Or give it a polish, and put it back on display?

Updates

We’re writing this blog post now because it seems there is some uncertainty from Google on what you can and can’t do with old content. Until recently at Spectrum, we thought that updating old pages was fine, as long as you acknowledged that the content had been updated. So, if you wrote a blog post on fishing laws back in 2015 you can add an extra paragraph now about the changes over the last three years. But, you should add a small note saying that the original post was from 2015. Or you could change the page publication date itself.

Computer screen animated

However, this was wrong. Google has no problem with you updating the content, but they don’t think you should be changing the dates. As just updating a post or page isn’t worthy of changing the publication date, unless you’re making major updates to the content. But, what is a major update? At the date of publication, it seems unsure.

Delete It?

So, with all this uncertainty would it be easier to just delete the poor quality content? Well…. Apparently not. John Mueller said in this recent webmasters hangout that Google will always prefer you to update a page over deleting one.

Deleting content creates a number of other issues for you to consider. Redirecting the old URLs being one. Google will see the missing holes in your site and try to crawl them. So if you’re not setting up redirects you could create more problems than you solve by deleting poor quality content.

What to Do?

Going forward we have made some simple decisions.

  1. If we see an old page or post that needs to be updated we will update the content. We will not change the publication date, however.
  2. If there is a page beyond saving, or that no longer has any relevance (for example a login page for a defunct platform) we will remove it and create a redirect to the most appropriate page.

What do you do with your poor quality content, or out of date web pages? We’d love to hear how you keep your site clean.


Photo credit – Top: Pxhere
                           Bottom: Pixabay

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit

Category: Content

About Massimo Paolini

Massimo is Co-CEO and Chief Data Scientist. On the web since the 90’s and a Google Partner since 2014, his expertise includes technical SEO, search marketing, marketing analytics/analysis, and online advertising. Massimo has an innate ability to sift through a sea of data, uncovering insights that formulate results-oriented strategies. He has taught Digital Marketing, Google Ads and SEO at UC Berkeley Extension since 2014—and presented at international search marketing conferences like SMXL in Milan.

Previous Post: « Image Optimization – Ranking on Google Images
Next Post: Google’s Slow Page Guide – Avoid Lazy Loading »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Case Studies
  • Content
  • Links
  • Local SEO
  • News & Events
  • PPC
  • Sales
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • Web Analytics
  • Web Design & Development

Recent Posts

  • Content Syndication, Distribution, & Contribution
  • Elementor vs. WordPress Gutenberg
  • B2B Content Marketing Trends in 2022
  • Maximize Your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
  • Introduction to Web Accessibility: Why, Types & ADA Compliance

Footer

Spectrum Group Online

About Us
Certifications
Contact Us

spectrum@spectrum-group-online.com
(408) 883-2276
San Jose, CA 95129

Stay On Top Of Your Game

Digital Marketing never stands still. Keep up with the latest online marketing trends, sign up for our monthly newsletter. We promise no SPAM and no sales pitches.

"*" indicates required fields

Privacy*

Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Instagram YouTube

Copyright © 2022 Spectrum Group Online, LLC | All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Site Map

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT