I'm going through a site to reduce index bloat, crawl budget, limit the number of pages for my keyword mapping. If you've removed/redirected old content, how did you measure the success of the project? Cheers! Barb
You start deleting content, you change the way the search engines view and rank your site in keyword searches. Even if you don't see a drop in SERPs, you can still be losing long tail keyword results that you don't even know about.
True. But let's say I'm ok with the risk or the decision was made, curious how to measure the impact? I've read some folks do not see a difference at all and some do. Is organic traffic the only logical way to measure the difference?
Well if I decided I needed to do this to one of my sites, I would closely watch SERPs. Then monitor analytics to make sure that there was no drop in traffic... As far as implementing changes, I would work in small segments and make sure that I was able to easily reverse changes should there be any problems. Always be ready to immediately undo what was done anytime you see a traffic or SERP drop. None of my sites are big enough for this to be a concern. And in my case, I would more than likely do damage by eliminating content.