Content Pruning to Improve Relevancy

[smithy]

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out why I keep on getting hit with every recent update.

My E-E-A-T could have definitely been better, which I have now improved upon. But looking at a couple of my other sites, which have remained dormant yet haven't been hit and have practically no EAT/EEAT signals, I'm now turning to relevancy.

As my site grew, I started to expand into what I believed was horizontally in the vertical, though Google may disagree.

Analyzing my traffic, I can see that the majority goes to 4/6 categories. Two categories don't get much of a look in, despite many articles surprisingly ranking in the top 5 for many of the keywords.

I'm wondering if anyone has either deleted or moved content to other categories where it would still make sense to be categorized under, and has noticed an increase in traffic or complete recovery from previous algorithm updates.

One of Google's guidelines for the HCU is, "Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?"

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've done content pruning, moving posts to other categories, deleting categories, and all that. I loved it. It focused my vision of the site, simplified my path forward, and I'm assuming it did the same for the user in terms of tightening things up. There was a bunch of stuff I shouldn't have published that got wiped out. Felt good.

What I can say is, if I'm understanding correctly, you're asking if simply moving posts out of two categories and then deleting those categories will recover you from an algorithm update. Meaning the content still exists, it's just sitting in a different category. I will say with nearly 100% confidence that the answer is no, especially if you don't have the category name in the URL path.

It's not about what category the content is in, I would think. It's about the content itself and the fact that it exists at all. Even this guideline you mentioned: "Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?"... I just don't see why Google would analyze category names rather than post content. Because otherwise you could put whatever content you want in a category as long as it had a kosher name.

Obviously that's really over-simplifying things, since we do know Google will treat a sub-folder differently, but I still suspect that's because of what's in the sub-folder and not how it's labeled.

 

[smithy]

That makes a lot of sense.

What I did end up doing was deleting all the single product review articles. This only amounted to 5% of the content. Almost all ranked in the top 5, though admittedly they were low quality. This in turn resulted in me deleting a couple of categories that existed solely to hold these reviews in their respective product categories.

I tried to objectively look at other content worth deleting, using time on page as one of the main metrics, but I can honestly say nothing else looked worth deleting.

I also deleted a couple of other categories that had no more than 20-25 posts in them, and moved their posts into other, larger categories where they would also fit, but I may reverse this move.