How to De-Optimize Your Web Content

Oh the dread of rewriting hundreds of content pages!

But sometimes we need to hunker down and declutter, de-optimize, re-optimize, and freshen up our content pages.

If your content was hit by the last Google ranking update, it’s likely Google doesn’t like your content or your SEO strategy.

As a search monopoly, they have their own views and priorities about content and tactics and they’re really putting the screws to everyone. Small biz and small publishers are struggling to deal with Google’s demands, but with some diligence and strategy we can make this challenge actually work for us.

Your Refresh Project – Feel Some Urgency

You may have to revise your content strategy as a whole, and rewrite your content pages.  Adjusting your wordage, topic themes, linking and more might be required, because this may get worse — given Google’s emphasis on quality.  There are spammy sites for sure that need to be deleted or revised, but for many businesses, a rewrite and a revised content strategy is all that’s called for.

This topic of how to de-optimize your content in no way invalidates SEO. Instead, this is an adjustment to your content and SEO strategy. Hopefully, they’ll be more fully aligned to give you the peak results, and become the market leader.

“Isn’t it better to just delete it all and start over?”  Going hog wild with the trash bag isn’t a great idea at all.  That would be a big waste. And you’ll have to start over with SEO, so you’ll lose a lot of traffic. And Google doesn’t like big changes like tahta either.  You need to feel urgency but not desperation and hastiness. They want better content, so let’s dig into why Google and our visitors don’t like it and then develop our new SEO/content strategy.

Rework That Old Content According to Plan

We need to weed out weak/irrelevant content for sure, as the years pass. This is normal.  But if the content is still relevant, productive, and supports our SEO strategy, it just needs to be reworked and improved.

If Google considers your content irrelevant, off the mark for user intent, or “spammy”, then they likely think your SEO is spammy too. It’s guilt by association. And it’s worse if your trust factor is weak. An upward adjustment is needed.

Given how much content each company has now, it is tough to keep old material fresh and relevant. This is why the evergreen topic strategy worked well.  It is designed to stay relevant and productive. Happily, we know old blog posts bring in a good chunk of leads — if they’re good.

De-optimization can also be a process of improving your content quality and strategy

I’ve got some tips below to help you de-optimize your content, save all your hard work, and re-write and re-engineer it to fit Google’s new directives. This is advanced SEO for sure, but just apply the tips below and you’ll find your content is more likable to Googlebot.

If you’re not a branding and engagement purist, you could ask ChatGPT to rewrite it for you while removing redundancy, focusing on key points, easing up on keyword use, and all the rest that writers are doing with ChatGPT.

Robot Love: We’re supposed to hand content creation off to a digitized bot version of ourselves anyway, and go grab a coffee.

Google Does Not Like SEO

Google’s recent core algorithm update reminds us once again, that Google doesn’t like SEO of any type. They never have and never will. They want to control interpretation of meanings and the cues to relevant content. We get to be passive.

It’s a pride thing too. They don’t like that we control our content’s meaning, value, and performance. They want to use an algorithm to decide and that we should just accept our ranking fate. Well, that doesn’t sound like fun.

They tell us not to write to their robot, yet we must, only speak to our human visitors and brand ambassadors too simultaneously — expertly. There’s no replacing expertise.

Google Knows Best?

Their ranking algorithm emphasizes content they believe is best for Google users, and replaces what actual humans do like. So you can have a page with an average reading time above 6 minutes, yet Google considers it low quality. If they didn’t like it, why would they all be immersed in it for 6+ minutes?

SEO isn’t dead. We have to evolve and apply it more surgically. The less trust Google has in your site, the more the last update will hit your site, and the more comprehensive your turnaround will be. And this process we’re discussing now has to become part of your SEO strategy going forward.

Recently, Linkedin reported a big surge in SEO roles, so it’s obvious a lot of companies will be going through this process.

Additionally, Google is highly pressured by Generative AI content — billions of pages created by Chatbots. It’s clogging their info pipeline.  It’s machine-generated and unvalidated by human experts. That makes it low quality and not the kind of content that humans want to interact with or that could be misleading and harmful.

Soon, the robot-love bloom will wear off. You’ll want to ensure your content doesn’t read like it’s prose from ChatGPT. It’s that quirky human thing in your branded copy by your authors that can help.  It’s your content creator’s personality and character that might save the day when the anti-AI thing hits the fan.

Core Algorithm Update

The recent August core algorithm update, still ongoing, is the latest in a series of insistent messages about how we must apply search engine optimization techniques to our improved high-quality content written for general users. It becomes either a punishing filter or an outright lengthy penalty on our content. If your optimization is overdone, in their estimation, then you must figure out why and what to rework, and then wait for the next update to recover.

It becomes what and how to do it.

It’s not such a bad thing, because in thinking hard on their latest challenge to us, we gain more insight into their interpretation of content quality and their new algorithm. Their interpretation of quality is not the same as real human users. It’s a computerized, business-based view of user engagement priorities, language, creative license, and more.

Okay, it’s a pain.

I welcome it as an inducement to really put a push on quality — to understand user semantics, intent, preferred engagement, impact, and persuasion. Might as well improve them all at once.

Approaching Content a Whole New Way

Let’s approach content design differently, while recognizing that SEO is not dead. Whoever optimizes best will get the lion’s share of traffic. The task now is tougher, requiring a more surgical application to text content. And the quality factor/rating also must be applied more surgically so it resonates to the benefits Google believes are most important.

And remember, pleasant, warm emotions felt by users isn’t part of the algorithm, but it’s vitally important to us, if we want a customer. Google watches clicks, while we focus on user emotions — the drivers of engagement and sales.

How to De-Optimize Your Web Content

• revisualize your content topics, themes and word usage — adjust them to hit on the precise things your readers want to read – features, product details, and emotional.
• create an engaging tone of voice – avoid telling/informing too much and instead encourage a conversation with a friend with directly relevant stories that evoke warm thoughts and feelings of personal value and esteem.
• review your content for redundancy — which Google interprets as fluff and an attempt to use search engine optimization to reinforce keyword use and internal linking.
• remove things that interfere with flow and engagement — read your content in your smartphone to get another view of the flow of your copy and whether the visual experience is contaminated.  Pay more attention to the flow, with no gaps or tough language that breaks the reading experience.
• reduce your use of exact-match keyword phrases in copy and anchor text — Google wants something more contextually relevant.
• reduce excessive linking to specific target pages — Google considers it excessive or unnatural.
• use less linking between pages — too many links could be distracting and cause the reader not to completely read the post, and Google views it as an optimization attempt.
• don’t use anchor text links for the first 5 paragraphs — let readers read, and lower Google’s suspicion. Save your more intense SEO-word play in the 6th paragraph and design that paragraph to be the key part of the page.
• reduce keywords in headings — Use more intriguing, emotional, and evocative words — but not clickbait.
• use questions, and how to do phrases — searchers are using questions, and Generative AI bots are answering them.
• reduce keywords used in your URLs — it’s excess that Google might see as an SEO indicator.
• reduce content topics that aren’t directly related — or better, introduce them and show how they’re relevant to the content in that page.
• keep your page headings, title tag, and paragraph headings under the limits as a rule — Once in a while is fine.
• tone down aggressive CTA’s and claims — hype words are often signs of compensating for a low-value offer.
• simplify and tone down your Schema Markup — write your product descriptions more naturally with keyword stuffing.
• cut down on pages with duplicate/redundant — Google prefers one page on a topic theme, but if you have several pages on a topic, ensure there is a unique purpose and treatment in those pages so they’re well differentiated.

When you check all of your old content, you’ll like see some awful stuff with broken links, broken videos, and material that doesn’t really serve your current content strategy, messaging or brand image.

Respect Your Content and SEO — Search Engines Supply the Largest Source of Visitors

So this process, seemingly a waste of company time, is actually the reverse. It’s respecting Google’s role in your digital marketing and helping you create a better information product and user experience.  That’s the best way to look at it.

Of course, advanced SEO is advanced strategy applied. Your elite SEO person is going to walk that narrow line to get the edge. That edge is the difference between first and 10th. And 10th doesn’t generate much visibility or sales.

And reworking your content respects your SEO and content work too.  A great content strategy should leverage old blogs and pages that are loved by users, highly linked to and which are proven to be your best lead generators.

It’s like fixing up a vintage automobile which grabs attention, suggests character, culture and a trusted history.

That old content is still a gold mine. Just clean up nicely and you’re generating power for your full content game.

See more on Advanced SEO, advanced content strategy, and better lead generation.

Contact me, Gord, at 416 998 6246 if you’re hoping to achieve more with your content marketing.