I eliminated content material from two of our pages to attempt to measure the impression that content material has on rankings. We misplaced a number of positions for a lot of phrases, and it damage, however it wasn’t as dangerous as I anticipated. These pages nonetheless ranked comparatively nicely with none content material.
You’ll be able to see the present content material for these pages on the weblog (prime Bing searches, prime YouTube searches). Each have 1-2K phrases and tons of knowledge.
Right here’s how they regarded through the take a look at:
In the event you’ve been studying our weblog, you’ll have seen my first try at measuring the impression of content material. I blocked the identical pages from being crawled with robots.txt, pondering this could take the content material out of the rating equation. The impression was minor sufficient that I wasn’t certain if my take a look at was really profitable.
My concept, primarily based on a remark from Google Search Advocate John Mueller, was that they could nonetheless be utilizing the previous content material to rank the web page. Right here’s what he stated:
I don’t suppose I can rule that out with this take a look at both. The impression feels too small. It’s doable they’re nonetheless utilizing the content material that was on the web page to rank it, or they could simply be rating due to the hyperlinks to the web page.
Both method, right here’s what I did and what occurred.
Take a look at setup
This was a fairly easy setup. I merely deleted the content material of the posts in WordPress and republished them.
I deleted the content material from these two posts on August eighth and restored it on August twentieth:
Warning
I don’t advocate doing this. Your outcomes could also be very totally different from ours.
Outcomes
Site visitors dropped after I eliminated the content material and recovered after I restored it.
High Bing searches web page site visitors:
High YouTube searches web page site visitors:
It appears worse than it’s. A lot of the rankings solely misplaced a number of positions.
Rankings for prime Bing searches web page:
Rankings for prime YouTube searches web page:
The YouTube web page misplaced probably the most site visitors, however I needed to indicate this from Google Search Console to indicate you it actually did solely lose a number of positions for the phrases.
Remaining ideas
Sure, it hurts to take away content material, and no, I don’t advocate you do it. However, if it occurs unintentionally, the impression on rankings won’t be that dangerous. You can even get well from it rapidly.
That stated, I can’t be 100% sure why our pages nonetheless ranked. It may be the hyperlinks propped up the rankings, however there’s an opportunity Google continues to be utilizing the previous content material from the web page for rating functions.
I feel what I have to do to check this correctly is to construct hyperlinks to a brand-new web page and see if it should rank. Message me on X (Twitter) in the event you’d prefer to see that.
For now, in the event you haven’t seen it already, try the examine on the impression of hyperlinks the place I disavowed all of the hyperlinks to those posts, together with good ones, to see what would occur. The outcomes have been really fairly much like this take a look at, the place the pages simply dropped a number of positions in rankings.