Some of Your Pages Are Dead Weight
And that is okay. It happens to every site.
The question is: what do you do about them?
The Three Options
Prune (delete/noindex). The page adds no value to users or search engines. No traffic. No backlinks. No useful content. Kill it. 301 redirect to the most relevant surviving page, or noindex it.
Merge. You have three blog posts about the same topic, each with 200 words. None rank. Combine them into one comprehensive 800-word post. Redirect the old URLs to the new one. Our content refresh strategy guide covers how to do this effectively.
Improve. The page targets a good keyword but the content is too thin to compete. Expand it. Add depth. Add media. Make it the best answer to the query.
How to Identify Thin Content
Pull your Google Search Console data. Sort pages by impressions over the last 6 months. Pages with zero impressions? Candidates for pruning. This is a core part of any SEO audit.
Crawl your site. Sort by word count. Pages under 200 words with no unique value? Candidates for merging.
Check analytics. Pages with high bounce rates and low time-on-page? Candidates for improvement.
The 80/20 Rule
Usually, 20% of your pages drive 80% of your traffic. The other 80% of pages are either support content or dead weight.
Your job is to figure out which is which.
Track content quality alongside 112 other technical checks at seocheckup.app. Free. No credit card. 30 seconds.