Every content-led site accumulates aged inventory: posts from three CMOs ago that nobody has looked at since. They're not neutral they dilute topical authority and cannibalize your good pages.
What aged content actually costs
- Crawl budget wasted on pages Google will never rank
- Topical authority diluted across duplicate coverage
- Internal link equity leaking to pages nobody should land on
- The team's mental model of the site "we have content on X" is a lie
The three-way decision
Every post older than 18 months gets one of three calls:
- Update. Traffic exists but has decayed. Fresh dates, new examples, add a section covering what changed. Re-publish, keep URL.
- Consolidate. Two or three thin posts on the same topic. Merge the best of each into one strong page, 301 the others.
- Delete and redirect. No traffic, no backlinks, no unique angle. 301 to the closest relevant page, or 410 if there isn't one.
The trap
Keeping thin posts "just in case." Every one you keep is a vote for less topical authority on the pages you actually want to rank.
Run the audit with the Content Audit tool.