Let's start from a premise: pruning posts and pages is SEO work that, in one way or another, becomes indispensable for all websites that tend to grow and structure themselves. Only single-page sites and those composed of two or three institutional resources can exempt themselves from this cut.
Yes, SEO pruning work has the same evolutionary basis as the activities carried out with the Deming cycle . So it's a bit like the one aimed at web performance : it requires consistency.
Website Analysis
First, we work on metrics and empirical observation. Then we philippines country code mobile number need to identify the pages that have few visits (usually less than 10 per year) in relation to impressions and poor positioning, also evaluating growth prospects. In short, what is the work to be done?
We look for pages that do little good, excluding those that must remain in any case. For example, those that are structural or have incoming links . Or that are fundamental for the user.
Content Pruning
Central phase of the work. so as not to create friction with the content you want to bring out. The starting rule is clear: if a page is not useful to the user, does not receive visits, does not have potential positioning and not even incoming links, it can be eliminated.
Maybe you can leave it in 404 as it happens in extreme cases. For example with editorial websites that publish hundreds of useless press releases. Of course you must remember to identify the broken internal links with Screaming Frog and then fix them.
Then, in some cases, it can be useful to merge two or more contents and create 301 redirects. Or you leave the pages but de-index them with a noindex meta tag or indicate a canonical towards the page that Google must take as a reference.