If you’re a content marketer striving for better organic traffic, you’ve probably heard of Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) framework and the Helpful Content Update.
Through the update and framework, Google is encouraging the creation of more helpful, reliable, and user-centric content.
And they have significantly impacted how content is valued and ranked.
In response, many content marketers are producing new content and improving existing content to align with Google’s guidelines.
Additionally, some content marketers have revisited the practice of pruning low-value content, a strategy that was particularly effective around 2015 and 2020, when Google’s quality-focused updates penalised sites with low-quality or duplicate content. Removing low-value content aligned well with Google’s focus on rewarding sites that provided valuable and relevant information.
While content quality remains crucial, the updates after 2020 have become more complex and the results of widespread content pruning less successful.
In fact, Google stated in their Helpful Content guidelines, ‘Are you adding a lot of new content or removing a lot of older content primarily because you believe it will help your search rankings overall by somehow making your site seem “fresh?” (No, it won’t)‘.
Am I advocating for content pruning to improve your site’s freshness? No I’m not. However, I do suggest that you can prune content to strengthen your topical authority.
To explain why, let’s explore Google’s March 2024 update and the recent leak of Google’s API documentation.
Both have led some SEOs to believe that Google now understands topical authority and relevance better than it had previously as some sites with little relevancy have been penalised and lost search visibility. From the leaked API docs, two specific variables pertaining to a site’s topical relevance were uncovered—siteFocusScore and siteRadius (more on these later).
Now, let’s dive into what content pruning and topical authority are, why content pruning might be a great way to refine your site’s topical focus, and how these practices can help you maintain a high-quality, authoritative website that continues to grow its search visibility.
What is content pruning?
Hubspot was one of the first to popularise the term in late 2015, advocating for the deleting of low-value content with the objective of seeing a boost in organic traffic. And case studies kept rolling in with Hubspot pruning its own website to great effect. Moz also did it with great success.
I even wrote a TorqueMag article about it later in 2018, titled Want A Boost In Organic Traffic? Optimize and Relaunch Your Old Content.
It was more straightforward back then but it should be something you focus on again now.
What is topical authority? And why is it so important?
Google first introduced the search system named “topical authority” to help surface relevant, expert, and knowledgeable content in Google Search and Google News in May 2023.
It refers to the level of expertise, authoritativeness, and comprehensiveness a website or author demonstrates on a specific subject or topic.
The original release in May ‘23 explained that the topical authority system “looks at a number of signals to understand the expertise of a publication in a specific area of interest”.
So essentially, as an SEO, I have little place writing, say, about American football and the topical authority system knows that. And any content I publish on the topic should be ranked (low or not at all) accordingly.
So you can start to see how influential the system may be.
Marie Haynes explains its importance, “I think that topical authority is incredibly important. If you are able to produce lots of content on your topic that actually is truly helpful to your audience, this is likely to help improve the chances that Google wants to show your content to people searching on your topics.”
Search Engine Journal published a study of 260,000 search results following the conclusion of Google’s March core update on April 19th 2024. “We’ve never seen any large Google ranking study demonstrate such high importance of topical authority.”
What I’m going to discuss is why topical authority should be a priority for your SEO and why this means you should be looking to prune your content.
Topic authority is documented in Google’s API leak
If you’re not following anyone in the SEO industry on LinkedIn, you might have missed the news about the leak. In May 2024, over 2,500 internal API documents from Google were made public.
Now this is by no means the ‘secret sauce’ or a checklist of what to do to beat Google. And quite appropriately Google has suggested that they ‘are out of context’.
However, what I found to be most interesting was the reference to the siteFocusScore and siteRadius variables.
Andrew Ansley on SearchEngineLand described them as:
- siteFocusScore denotes how much a site is focused on a specific topic.
- siteRadius measures how far page embeddings deviate from the site embedding. In plain speech, Google creates a topical identity for your website, and every page is measured against that identity.
These clearly indicate the importance of topical authority.
Understanding these concepts is crucial as we move on to discuss how to begin content pruning to improve your site’s topical authority.
How to begin content pruning to improve topical authority
When developing a content strategy, the first question I ask clients is: What topics do you want to be known as experts in?
Here are a few important considerations for this question:
- Relevance to Products or Services: Is the topic directly related to the products or services you offer? If not, what’s the objective of having them in the content strategy?
- Access to Authoritative Contributors: Do you have access to authors or contributors who have authority on these topics? While a brand or publisher can build its own authority on a topic, having authoritative contributors may build this authority better and faster.
- Ability to Stand Out: Can your brand stand out among others who also share topical authority? For example, a physiotherapist client of mine wanted to be an authority on back pain. While there is a high volume of searches for this topic, it includes a wide range of subtopics, such as pharmaceuticals. They were unlikely to stand out on Google. So, we refined it to ‘exercises for back pain’.
- Focus on a Manageable Number of Topics: Be realistic about how many topics you can be a real authority on. Clearscope, in their post Topical Authority: The What, Why, and How, provided a few examples of well-known websites with strong topical authority:
a. HubSpot: Inbound marketing, digital marketing, sales process
b. Forbes: Business, personal finance, investing, career growth
c. Vogue: Fashion, beauty, style
These are all massive sites with a clear focus.
Once you’ve identified the topics you want to be a topical authority on, let’s look at how content pruning can help.
Conduct a content audit
You should be doing this every six to 12 months.
In a traditional content audit you should already be looking at:
– identifying top-performing and underperforming content based on traffic and engagement/conversion metrics.
– assessing keyword rankings, organic search traffic, and backlink profiles.
– reviewing the quality of the content. Ensure it aligns with your brand voice and provides value to the audience.
But in your next audit, think about expanding on your audit, considering those calls from Google’s API docs:
siteFocusScore, which denotes how much a site is focused on a specific topic, and
siteRadius, which measures how far page embeddings deviate from the site embedding.
In your audit, note which nominated topic each post is speaking to and give it your own ‘siteRadius’ score judging how closely related it is to the topic.
Taking action
After a traditional content audit, depending on your findings, you should look to take actions including:
– merging content
– optimising content
– re-writing content to add more value
– trashing content and redirecting to a similar piece
But now armed with your own siteRadius score, you can begin to start shaping your topical authority or your own ‘siteFocusScore’.
Any content that is not relevant to the topics you nominated should be considered disposable, unless they’re leaning more toward company news. Be brutal. Even if they’re generating organic traffic, you should consider removing them and redirecting the URL to a post that bridges the gap between the trashed post and the most closely related post that you’re keeping.
A few more tips
If you’re going to improve your topical authority, then take a more holistic view on your efforts.
– Consider your topics when you’re link building. For example, if you’re looking at DA or traffic to judge your links, consider the publisher, the page that will link to yours and even the paragraph your link will sit and ask yourself, is it topically relevant?
– Consider your internal link structure too. Create internal links between all of the content that is focused on a given topic if you haven’t already.
– Optimise your site structure and navigation to further demonstrate your site’s topical authoritativeness.
– Understand where the specific audiences talking about or looking for information on your nominated topics spent time online and go there to engage. This might be LinkedIn and if that’s the case, identify if there are specific groups or specific voices that you should engage. It could be subreddits or Quora or other forums on the web.
– If you’re looking to work with an influencer, understand what topics they are authorities on. If they match yours they might be a great fit.
– Author! Google matches authors with entities in the knowledge graph and uses them in Google news, so make sure each piece of content has an author.
To stay ahead in SEO, you should adapt to Google’s updates and understand their broader intentions. Google’s goal is to provide a great user experience by delivering valuable and trustworthy content.
So I encourage you to regularly audit your content and embrace content pruning to maintain a high-quality, authoritative website that continues to grow its search visibility. While focusing on each piece of content, also consider how your site as a whole demonstrates its topical authority and focus.
