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Does Reducing or Removing Written Content Affect Search Visibility?
Ever wondered what would happen to your rankings and search visibility if you removed all of the written content on your site? We conducted an experiment over Christmas, and so we can now tell you exactly what happens.
Design vs SEO - Just How Important are Words for Getting Found
When organisations develop new websites, they’ll often try to strip out a load of ugly, wordy content, and make the site much more streamlined. Often, they’ll remove swathes of old content, or delete or decide not to migrate old blogs, articles and guides that they no longer value. Typically, web designers like clean, simple design, without a load of messy words cluttering up their beautiful pages. One designer said to me that design should do all the work, and his dream website would have no words/written content.
In these cases, after a sharp intake of breath and much sucking of teeth, we at Zelst will try to explain the value words have and why it’s not a great idea to remove them from your website. We have plenty of examples of sites that have ignored such advice and decided to remove content, but, as this is typically in conjunction with something else, such as moving to a new site, a merger, rebrand or other big change, there can always be other mitigating factors, which can be blamed.
So why not take a website that is performing OK in search, leave everything as it is, but just remove the words on all the pages? Better still, don’t make any other changes for a couple of weeks and see how it all turns out.
Confession Time
As carefully reasoned, strategic and scientific as this carefully controlled experiment sounds, I have a confession to make: - we didn’t do it on purpose.
Our web developer, just before Christmas, made some ‘routine’ security updates to our site. The changes had been tested on the staging site, and everything was fine, so as this was just ‘routine’ security updates, the exception was made to the golden rule of ‘Don’t Deploy on Friday’ was waived.
And on Friday, everything seemed to be OK. It was only when I happened to look at something on our website over the weekend that I had any idea anything was wrong, but when the team started looking at the site on Monday morning, they found that all of the pages were there, the images, headings, menus, buttons, everything, in fact, but the written content on virtually all of the pages!
After an investigation had failed to find any issues, the site was restored to a backup of the site on Thursday evening and all was back to normal…... for a day or so.
Further investigations still found nothing that could be attributed to the issue, so once more we restored from the backup, and, again, everything was back to normal for a day or so, until it wasn’t, by which time it was Christmas and everything had come to a halt.
During the week between Christmas and New Year, I did try to make another restore, but the same thing happened, so our website sat for a week or so with everything but words on it!
When our developers returned to work, the investigations restarted. However, it wasn’t until the middle of January that they uncovered that it was an issue with one of the Content Management System (CMS) modules, which was deleting all of the written content overnight. And it wasn’t until the end of January that the module developers could apply a fix.
What Happened to Search Visibility During That Time?
In the week following the initial deletion of written content, Search Visibility fell slightly; however, in the week following Christmas, when content disappeared for the longest time, it fell dramatically.
As we patched up the site with regular restores during January, there was a slight recovery but it wasn’t until the site had been fully fixed and the pages, with their content, had been stable for a period of time, that visibility fully recovered, and then, thankfully continued to grow as Google started to trust the content more.
The trend in Average Position is even more pronounced: -
What Does This Tell Us About the Relationship Between Content and Search Visibility?
The key conclusion to our experiment is that you need words on your pages to rank in Google, and, without written content, you lose visibility.
It’s pretty obvious, really, however, the number of arguments we have on the subject is quite something, and designers, who are selling a sexy new look, can often be very persuasive. Our experiment, though, is a clear guide to what you should and should not do.
And p.s., don’t deploy changes on a Friday, especially not the Friday just before Christmas!
