inherited a content site with years of old posts, and a big chunk of it gets basically zero traffic. my instinct is to start deleting to tidy up the index, but ive heard horror stories of people pruning and tanking their whole site. before i rip anything out i want a sane way to decide per page, delete versus noindex versus just leave it alone. whats your actual process for deciding what dead content is really hurting you versus what is just sitting there harmlessly? i have analytics and search console wired up.
pull search console and analytics and rank every url by traffic and impressions before you touch anything, that gives you an objective hit list instead of deleting by gut feel. the zero traffic pages arent always the ones hurting you, sometimes an old post pulls a steady trickle or feeds internal links you forgot about. look at the data per page before you judge any of it.
do it in batches not one giant purge, and watch search console for a couple weeks after each batch so you can attribute any movement. pull the obvious thin and overlapping stuff first, three near identical posts targeting the same term are cannibalizing each other and consolidating them into one strong page usually helps more than deleting outright. merge before you nuke.
a lot of what gets labeled dead content is actually fine where it is, the problem is more often crawl budget and thin pages diluting the good ones than the pages existing at all. for most low value stuff noindex is the safer move than delete, you keep it off the index without throwing away a url that might hold a link or the occasional visit. check what links to it before you blame the page.
whatever you do remove, map the redirects first, because a deleted post that had links pointing at it from other pages or from the wild turns into a pile of 404s and broken internal links. pull your internal link report, redirect anything with links to the closest relevant page, then delete. order matters or you trade a harmless dead page for a live broken one.
the noindex versus delete distinction is the one i would have completely skipped, i was about to hard delete everything with low traffic. just checked and a bunch of those zero traffic posts actually have internal links pointing at them. profiling in search console now and ill consolidate the overlapping ones first like sage said, then noindex the rest instead of deleting blind.
exactly, and make the noindex pass and any actual deletions separate changes so if your traffic moves you know which one did it. search console wont show the effect instantly, it takes weeks to recrawl, so dont panic if nothing changes the first few days. one variable at a time even in cleanup or youll never know what worked.