Old content that has little or no value, under-performing as well as duplicate can cause a decrease in your website’s rankings during post Panda 4.0. You should avoid polluting your rankings by pruning your content and including pages that you only want Google to rank in their index.
How to prune your content
Method A: Use Google Webmaster tools
- Google Index > Index status – crawled pages by the Google bot
- Search traffic > Internal Links –list your pages and number of links pointing to each page
Method B: Use ‘Site‘ and ‘Google SERP Extractor‘
- Identify pages with low ranking on GWT by taking a look at the top pages and sorting them out by ‘clicks’.
- Classify underperforming pages by checking the number of impressions in a particular period of time.
- Apply no-index on the underperforming pages
Robots.txt prevents Google from crawling the pages
Apply <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> on the header of these pages