Modern engines try to figure out what a website is about.
They do this by taking into account the content published on the site.
Engines try to connect the dots
Like the "join the dots" game my daughters used to play to draw a cat, a car or a unicorn.
Every concept is a dot.
In SEO, we call those concepts entities.
Now, when connecting a certain amount of dots, 85 in the image above, the unicorn is clearly visible.
But what happens when you'd suddenly have 1000 dots up there, many of which have no relation to each other?
What about 10000 dots?
The image would definitely not be that clear anymore.
The unicorn pattern would be hardly distinguishable.
The same happens with a site with too much content:
The core concept is hardly recognizable.
A while ago, we audited a website with literally more than 5000 articles with little or no relation to the brand's core business.
The result?
The site had stopped ranking for its core business terms.
Thousands and thousands of dollars had to be invested into Google Ads to compensate for lost quality traffic, while the brand - unknowingly - kept making it worse by continuing with its publishing process.
Only a few weeks after a heavy pruning process, I received the following e-mail:
"We have paused paid ads"
- this meant they just got a 2x return on our pruning process my team helped them with, only 2 weeks afterwards.
But how could it come so far in the first place?
See, Google tends to rewards good content.
But if that content isn't in line with your core business, the traffic is useless.
While seeing the traffic go up is encouraging,
you must never lose sight of the traffic quality.
This is why we've got a special high-intent tracking setup on all our clients' projects, this enables us to always judge how interested visitors are in our clients' business and offer, and can react fast if the interest level changes.
For AI to understand your brand and your products, context is key.
Context helps AI bots to figure things out.
A person, a product, a service, a brand, or an entire business.
If the context is distracting, AI is going to start making stuff up
and driving bad visitors to your site (or no visitors at all).
Regular pruning is the way to clarity for your visitors,
but also for AI engines.
e-mail info@gertmellak.com for more information about your website's pruning!