Google explains how you can know which pages should be removed

In the world of SEO, we have a lot of things to take care of when it comes to ranking a website as well as handling its backend and frontend both at the same time. This job becomes easier when you have a whole team but if you are alone then this could get harder for anyone.

While content and SEO have always been the main points of making a website rank, there are small details too which are often being overlooked by many people out there. For example, the site’s loading speed is also a ranking factor since it helps the user stay on the website for longer.

Now, the best way to keep the site lightweight and load faster is by keeping a low amount of pages since the heavier the content, the slower will be its loading speed. So people tend to delete older pages which they feel are not getting traffic and just sitting there taking storage space and making the site heavy. However, Google has come out to explain how you can determine which pages need to be removed and which are safe to be kept as it is.

Google’s John Mueller, particularly referring to a news website like us, says that:

“with a news website, it seems pretty normal that you’d have a lot of articles that are interesting for a short period of time, that is perhaps more of a snapshot from a day to day basis for a local area.

And it’s kind of normal that they don’t become big, popular stories on your website.

So from that point of view, I wouldn’t necessarily call those articles low-quality articles, for example.”

But John Mueller does mention that you should look at why the articles are not getting traffic, if the content is the problem then you should remove them but not because they are not getting traffic while the content is good.