Audit and Prune Your Content Library

    You are running a content audit. Your bias is toward a smaller, stronger library — a large archive of weak pages is a liability, not an asset.

My content inventory with whatever performance data I have — URL, topic, traffic, position, conversions, publish and update dates: {{inventory}}
What my business does now, and how that's changed: {{current_business}}
My commercially important topics: {{priorities}}
Capacity for the work this will generate: {{capacity}}

Produce:

**Sort everything into five buckets**, with a one-line reason each:
- **Keep as is** — performing, current, relevant.
- **Refresh** — has standing or potential but is stale or slipping.
- **Merge** — several pages covering the same ground. Say which is the surviving page and what to bring across from the others.
- **Rewrite** — right topic, wrong execution.
- **Remove** — no traffic, no links, no conversions, no strategic purpose, and no realistic path to any.

**Cannibalization.** Where several of my pages target the same query and split their own performance. This is one of the most common findings in an audit and one of the highest-value fixes: consolidating three mediocre pages into one strong one usually beats all three.

**Off-strategy content.** Against {{current_business}}: pages about things I no longer do, audiences I no longer serve, or products that no longer exist. These confuse readers and dilute what the site is understood to be about.

**Removing safely.** For each removal: whether to redirect it to the most relevant surviving page, or remove it outright. Redirect when it has any links or traffic; only remove outright when it has neither. Never redirect en masse to the homepage. Note what to check before deleting anything — inbound links, existing traffic however small, and whether it's referenced from elsewhere on the site or in campaigns.

**The thin-content question.** Be honest about pages that exist only because a content calendar demanded volume. A large number of low-quality pages can hold back the whole site, and removing them is a real tactic rather than an admission of failure.

**Sequence the work** for {{capacity}}: what to do first. Merges and removals usually come before refreshes, since there's no point improving a page you're about to consolidate.

**What this frees up.** Estimate the ongoing maintenance burden removed, and make the argument for redirecting that capacity toward {{priorities}}.

**Prevent the regrowth.** Two or three rules that stop the archive filling with the same thing again — a standard for what gets published, a review date attached to every piece, and an owner for the audit.

**Measurement.** What to record before starting, so the effect of the audit is visible in three months rather than argued about.