# Content audit

A content audit is a review of every page of a site against its figures, ending in one decision per page: keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove. It is the exercise that turns a growing library into a maintained one. On a small site it is an afternoon with a spreadsheet.

Updated 2026-09-15 · Source: https://porteur.ai/glossary/content-audit

## The table

| Column | Where it comes from |
| --- | --- |
| URL | A crawl of the site, or the sitemap |
| Clicks and impressions, 12 months | The Performance report in Search Console, exported |
| Inbound links | The Links report in Search Console, or a link index |
| Last updated | Your CMS or the page itself |
| The search it was written for | Your keyword map, or the Performance report filtered to the page |
| Purpose | One line: what this page is for |
| Decision | Keep, refresh, merge, redirect, remove |

## The five decisions

- Keep: it earns clicks or links and is accurate. Do nothing.
- Refresh: it has impressions and falling clicks, or facts that have aged. Same URL, updated content and date.
- Merge: it competes with another page of yours. Fold the better parts into the stronger URL and redirect this one.
- Redirect: it has no purpose but an equivalent page exists. A 301 to that page.
- Remove: no clicks, no impressions, no links, no purpose for a year. Return 410, or 404.

> Google has said there is no penalty for having many pages, and also that low-quality pages can affect how a site is assessed. The gain from pruning is a site whose indexed pages are the ones worth ranking.

## The rhythm

1. **Run it when you have forgotten pages** Below fifty pages you know them all. Past a hundred, the audit tells you things you did not know.
2. **Do the decisions in one pass** Decide every row before you change anything. Mixing deciding and editing turns an afternoon into a month.
3. **Ship the removals and redirects first** They are quick, they clean the index, and they make the refresh list shorter.
4. **Repeat quarterly and judge on the figures** Compare the quarter after with the quarter before, by page. That is how you learn which decisions were right.

## Questions

### What is a content audit?

A review of every page against its figures, ending in one decision per page: keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove. The output is a table, not a report nobody acts on.

### How often should I run one?

Once the site is past about a hundred pages, then quarterly. A small site can review the pages that lost clicks monthly and do the full table twice a year.

### Should I delete pages that get no traffic?

Only if they also have no links and no purpose after a year. A page that supports a sale or answers a support question earns its place without search clicks.

### Does deleting pages improve rankings?

Not by itself. It removes pages that dilute a site and waste crawling. The gain shows up as the remaining pages being crawled and assessed more often.

### What data do I need to start?

A list of URLs, twelve months of clicks and impressions from Search Console, and whatever link data you have. Everything else is judgement you already hold.

## Read next

- [A content audit for a small site: one table, one decision a row](https://porteur.ai/guides/content-audit): Build a one-table content audit you can finish in a day. See what to keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove, and what to fix first next quarter.
- [How to refresh a page that lost its traffic](https://porteur.ai/guides/content-refresh): Find why a page lost clicks, refresh what searchers want now, and measure the result. Keep the same URL, update facts, sections, links and date.
- [Content pruning](https://porteur.ai/glossary/content-pruning): What content pruning is, how to judge pages with data, the four choices per page, and how to avoid traps when you tidy your index.
- [Content decay](https://porteur.ai/glossary/content-decay): Content decay is when a once-performing page loses traffic over time. See the causes, how to measure it in Search Console, and how to fix it.
- [When to merge two pages, and how to do it without losing the ranking](https://porteur.ai/guides/when-to-merge-pages): Two pages target the same searches. Here is when to merge, which URL to keep, how to fold content, and how to redirect without losing the ranking.
- [Delete or redirect an old page: 301, 404 or 410](https://porteur.ai/guides/delete-or-redirect-old-pages): Decide per page: 301 if a clear equivalent exists, else 404 or 410. Check links and clicks first, avoid home page redirects, and monitor what Google drops.
- [How to find declining pages in Search Console before the traffic is gone](https://porteur.ai/guides/find-declining-pages-in-search-console): Use Search Console to compare periods, sort by click loss, read queries, and act before a page’s traffic is gone. Works for SaaS and small shops.
- [Index bloat](https://porteur.ai/glossary/index-bloat): Index bloat is when Google indexes far more URLs than you want to rank. Here is how to spot it in Search Console and fix it by template.

The free check reads your pages and the searches around them, and names the ones that earn nothing, in about thirty seconds. Free check: https://porteur.ai/