Content Pruning: How Deleting 40% of My Articles Doubled My Traffic

In early 2025, The Turtle Hub had around 180 published articles. Traffic had plateaued for months. I was publishing two new articles a week, but nothing moved the needle. Something was wrong, and it wasn't that I needed more content.

The problem was the opposite: I had too much.

The Counterintuitive Truth About Content Volume

There's a persistent myth in the content SEO world that more is better. Publish more, rank for more keywords, get more traffic. It's logical on paper, but Google's algorithms have gotten sophisticated enough to evaluate site quality holistically.

When a significant portion of your content is thin, outdated, or doesn't match search intent, it drags down your entire domain. Google doesn't just evaluate individual pages — it evaluates whether your site as a whole is a trustworthy source of information in your niche.

I realized that about 40% of my articles were doing more harm than good. They had low traffic, high bounce rates, thin content (under 800 words for topics that needed 2,000+), or were targeting keywords I had no business ranking for.

The Pruning Process

Here's the exact process I followed:

Step 1: Audit everything. I pulled all articles into a spreadsheet with their traffic (last 90 days), bounce rate, average time on page, and word count. Any article with fewer than 50 visits in 90 days was flagged for review.

Step 2: Categorize each flagged article. Every underperforming article got one of three labels:

• Delete: The topic is irrelevant, too competitive, or the content is irrecoverably thin. No redirect needed if there's nothing to redirect to.
• Merge: The article covers a topic that's already covered better by another article. Consolidate the best parts into the stronger article and redirect.
• Rewrite: The topic is worth targeting, but the content needs to be significantly better. Complete rewrite, not just edits.

Step 3: Execute ruthlessly. This is where most people stall. Deleting content you spent hours creating feels wrong. But keeping dead weight hurts more than removing it.

The Numbers

Out of 180 articles on The Turtle Hub:

• 42 were deleted outright (23%)
• 28 were merged into stronger articles (16%)
• 15 were completely rewritten (8%)
• 95 were left as-is (53%)

After pruning, the site went from 180 to around 110 published articles. That's a 39% reduction in content.

Within 8 weeks, organic traffic increased by roughly 85%. Within 12 weeks, it had more than doubled. The site went from around 8,000 monthly visitors to over 18,000.

The average time on site jumped from 1:45 to 3:11. Bounce rate dropped from 81% to 72%. These weren't just vanity metrics — they meant real people were actually reading and finding value in the content.

Why This Works

The mechanism isn't complicated. When you remove low-quality pages:

• Crawl budget improves. Google has finite resources to crawl your site. When it's not wasting time on pages that don't rank, it spends more time on pages that do.
• Domain authority signal strengthens. Your remaining content is all above a quality threshold. The average quality of your indexed pages goes up significantly.
• Internal link equity concentrates. Instead of spreading PageRank across 180 pages, it flows through 110 stronger pages. Each remaining page gets more link juice.
• User metrics improve. Visitors find better content faster. They stay longer, click more, and bounce less. Google notices these behavioral signals.

I Applied This Across All My Sites

After seeing the results on The Turtle Hub, I ran the same process on Acuario Pets, Giftlytic, Gigapaw, and Classic Fork. The results varied by site, but every single one saw traffic improvements within 6-10 weeks.

Acuario Pets saw the most dramatic improvement — it's now the highest-traffic site in my portfolio at 20,800 monthly visitors. Giftlytic's bounce rate dropped from 92% to 86%, which is still high but moving in the right direction (gift sites inherently have higher bounce rates because people find what they need and leave to buy).

When to Prune

Content pruning isn't a one-time event. I now do a quarterly review of all sites. The criteria have evolved, but the core question remains the same: Is this article the best answer to the question it targets?

If the answer is no and I can't make it the best answer, it gets cut.

If you haven't pruned your content in a while and your traffic has plateaued, this might be the highest-leverage thing you can do. Not more content. Better content. And sometimes, that means less of it.