Want to improve your Web site? Delete your content

The more you simplify your site, the better the chance Web visitors will find what they need

I recently worked with an organization that managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its Web site. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of effort to build up an internal consensus that actually deleting content was a good idea.

“You can’t delete that,” people would say, “because you never know when someone might need it.” Even content that had become out-of-date and was now actually misleading was defended. “I don’t have time to review or delete,” was another excuse.

Working with another organization I found a page that was old and contained content that was now clearly wrong and misleading.

“You can’t delete that,” the Web manager said to me tersely.

“Why not?” I replied.

“It will hurt our search engine optimization.”

It will what? This Web manager—to call him a manager, I know, is stretching the meaning of the word—had become a search engine optimization fanatic. (There are quite a few out there.)