How to Identify Low-Value Content with Clariti

Creating valuable, engaging, and relevant content is the cornerstone of a successful WordPress site. However, low-value content can negatively impact your site’s performance, search engine rankings, and user engagement. Let’s explore what low-value content is, why it matters, and how Clariti can help you identify and manage it effectively.

What is Low-Value Content?

Low-value content refers to pages, posts, or media that add little to no benefit for your visitors or search engines. This type of content often includes:

• Thin Content: Pages with minimal information that fail to provide substantive value or answer user questions effectively. Examples include placeholder pages or posts with just a few sentences.
• Duplicate Content: Content that is identical or very similar to other pages on your site. This can confuse search engines and dilute your site’s authority.
• Outdated Content: Posts or pages with outdated information, such as old event details, obsolete statistics, expired giveaways, or discontinued products.
• Irrelevant Content: Articles or pages that no longer align with your site’s purpose or audience interests. For instance, a tech blog featuring a few random recipes or travel tips.
• Low-Quality Content: Posts with poor grammar, spelling errors, or irrelevant keywords stuffed unnaturally for SEO purposes.

How Does Low-Value Content Negatively Impact Your Site?

Low-value content can harm your WordPress site in several ways:

Hurts Search Engine Rankings 

Search engines prioritize high-quality, user-focused content. Low-value pages can decrease your site’s overall authority leading to lower rankings. For example, Google’s algorithms may penalize thin or duplicate content.

Reduces User Engagement 

Visitors who encounter irrelevant or low-quality content are likely to leave your site quickly, increasing your bounce rate—signaling to search engines that your site isn’t meeting user expectations.

Wastes Crawl Budget 

Search engines allocate a specific crawl budget for each site. Low-value pages can waste this budget, leaving your high-value content less likely to be indexed and ranked.

Dilutes Your Brand Authority 

Publishing irrelevant or poorly written content can damage your brand’s credibility, making it more difficult to establish trust with your audience.

Consumes Resources 

 Maintaining and hosting unnecessary content diverts time and money from optimizing high-value posts.

How to Address Low-Value Content

Now that you understand low-value content and why it’s harmful, conduct a content audit to identify it and either improve, merge, or remove it. Tools like Clariti and Google Analytics can help pinpoint pages with low traffic, high bounce rates, or poor engagement metrics.

How to identify low-value content in Clariti

Clariti is the perfect tool for identifying low-value content on your WordPress site. Let’s explore actionable strategies for finding and addressing different types of low-value content. 

How to find thin content

As a reminder, thin content lacks depth and information to provide value or answer reader questions. While some of this is entirely subjective, look at your content through the lens of Google—is your post answering the user’s search query as an authority?  

Word count is a great place to start. 

1. From the Explore tab, filter by Word count, sorting from lowest to highest. Add metrics like page views, incoming links, and internal links to the columns in this view to get a better idea of the content’s overall value. 

2. From here, I’ll add the top 20 posts to a new project called ‘Thin Content’ and take a closer look at each post to determine if it should be improved, merged, or removed.
   
   While we used 20 posts in this example, the number of posts added to the project will be different for everyone. We have a very large site with over 3,200 posts, some of which are 15+ years old. We have more “thin” content than most! 

✨ Clariti Tip: This is a great place to use Clairi Labels! Just set up three labels: improve, merge, or remove, and use them in all of your low-quality content projects. 

Here’s an example of thin content from the Curbly site with just 18 words in this post!

 How to Tackle Duplicate Content

There aren’t any tools that can easily search for these. However, before I start a new post, I do a search to ensure there’s no existing content that can be improved upon. 

When you find duplicate content: 

1. Use Clariti to gauge which post is stronger by comparing: 
   • Page views
   • Inbound links
   • Comments
   • If your site is monetized, check the RPMs of your post in your ad network Dashboard.
2. Make sure the stronger post is in excellent condition. Fix any flagged issues. Add anything from the weaker post that would make the stronger post more valuable to your audience. 
3. Set up a redirect of the weaker post to the stronger one. 
4.  Add a noindex tag to the weaker post to prevent it from affecting your site’s SEO 
5. Add a note to each of the posts in Clariti as a reminder of the work you’ve done.

Keep in mind there’s usually no need to delete this content. 

Finding Outdated Content

 Outdated content often includes old event details, obsolete statistics, expired giveaways, or discontinued products. These are some of my favorite things to remove from a site! 

1. Search for outdated Events: On the Explore Page, search for words like “giveaway” and “challenge.” For context, include page views, incoming links, and internal links in the columns. Also, add the Date Published filter to narrow down your results more quickly.
2. Find discontinued products using the broken links filter with the external links count filter. Posts with a high number of external links and broken links tend to be outdated product roundups. 
3. Add all of these posts to the ‘Outdated Content’ project and take a closer look at each post to determine if it should be improved, merged, or removed.

Manage Irrelevant Content

We all have some content, especially from when our blogs first started, that really doesn’t fit with where we’re at right now. For the Curbly site, there were a handful of outdated recipes with low-quality images—and no recipe cards! Luckily for us, this was as simple as filtering by category. 

1. From the Explore tab, filter by WordPress category and/or tag. 
2. Add these posts to an ‘Irrelevant content’ project and again, take a closer look at each post to determine if the posts should be improved, merged, or removed.

✨ Clariti Tip: If a post is irrelevant or off-brand but performs well, always KEEP IT! 

How much content is too much to delete? 

As a very general rule, I suggest deleting no more than 1% of your content at a time.

After your first round of deletion, give your site some time to settle. You can revisit your low-value content projects in Clariti once a quarter and see if there’s anything else you’re ready to let go of. 

By prioritizing high-value content, you’ll create a better user experience, improve your site’s SEO, and enhance your brand’s authority.

Additional resources:

• How Curbly Uses Clariti to Identify Low-Quality Content
• FBP Rewind: Brainstorming Content Ideas with Ranking Potential and Writing Great Blog Posts with Ashley Segura