Explainer: Does Removing Old Articles Help Your Crawl Budget & Rankings?

If you’ve ever wondered whether deleting old blog posts or pruning pages from your website will boost your Google rankings, here’s the simple answer: It depends. Let’s break it down with insights from Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan.

Pic Credit: https://x.com/Jonny_J_

1. What’s “Crawl Budget”? (And Should You Care?)

• Crawl Budget = How often Googlebot visits and indexes your site’s pages.
• For Giant Sites: If you’re Amazon or Wikipedia, optimizing crawl budget matters. Googlebot needs to prioritize which pages to crawl first.
• For Smaller Sites: Danny Sullivan says, “If your site is not gigantic, then I wouldn’t worry about this.”

2. When Does Pruning Help?

Pruning (removing pages) can improve SEO only in specific cases:

• Duplicate Content:“If it’s around removing duplication of pages (20 of the same pages), then yes.”
  • Example: Deleting 10 identical product pages for the same shirt frees Googlebot to focus on unique content.
• Low-Quality Pages: Remove thin, outdated, or irrelevant content to strengthen your site’s overall authority.

3. When Does Pruning Hurt?

• Deleting Good Content: Removing helpful, traffic-driving articles can backfire.
• Broken Links: Forgetting to redirect deleted pages (use 301 redirects) leads to 404 errors, harming user experience.

4. Danny Sullivan’s Advice for Small Sites

• “Focus on quality, not quantity.”
  • Instead of pruning, update old posts or merge similar articles.
• “Don’t overthink crawl budget unless you’re a massive site.”

What Should You Do?

1. Audit Your Site: Use tools like Google Search Console to find duplicates or low-performing pages.
2. Keep What’s Useful: Don’t delete articles that still get traffic or backlinks.
3. Redirect or Update: For removed pages, set up redirects. For outdated content, refresh it.

TL;DR:

• Small sites: Don’t stress about crawl budget. Focus on fixing duplicates and improving content.
• Big sites: Prune duplicates to help Googlebot crawl efficiently.
• Always prioritize quality over quantity—Google rewards helpful content, not a perfectly trimmed sitemap.