Content cleanup

What content cleanup is

Content cleanup is the doing. Somebody has decided that a hundred and forty of your four hundred pages should go, that eleven overlapping posts should become three, and that the rest should stay. Cleanup is the work of actually deleting, merging, redirecting and then checking that nothing broke — carried out in your CMS, page by page, with a record of every change.

It is not the decision. Deciding what goes is content pruning if the question is editorial, or pruning and de-indexing if the question is which pages earn and which drag. Both of those produce a list. This service takes that list and applies it. Buying the execution without the decision is possible, but it usually means I stop halfway through to ask you eighty questions, which is slower and costs more than deciding first.

When you need it

When the list already exists and nobody has time to work through it. A pruning report is a satisfying document to receive and a miserable one to action: each row is five or ten minutes of careful work in the CMS, and four hundred rows is a fortnight nobody on your staff has.

It is also the right buy when the clear-out has been half done. Somebody deleted sixty pages last year without redirecting any of them, so the site now has sixty dead addresses that other sites and old emails still point at. That is worse than leaving the pages up, and it is fixable in a few days.

You do not need this if the whole site is being rebuilt in the next few months. In that case the clear-out folds into the move itself and costs you nothing extra, because the decisions are being made anyway. And you do not need it if you have never listed what you have: start with a complete list of what exists, because you cannot clean up an unknown quantity.

What the work covers

• Deletions. Each page removed, with a redirect to the most useful surviving page on the same subject. Never a blanket redirect to the home page, which is how a reader learns that you deleted the thing they wanted.
• Merges. Where several pages cover one subject, the strongest becomes the survivor, the useful material from the others is folded into it, and the rest redirect to it. The merged page is re-edited so it reads as one piece rather than three stitched together.
• Redirects. One row per removed address, applied and then tested by requesting the old address and seeing where it lands. Redirect chains left over from earlier clear-outs are shortened to a single hop.
• The links that pointed at the dead pages. Every internal link to a deleted or merged page repointed at its replacement, so no reader is routed through a redirect to get around your own site.
• The navigation. Menus, category listings, footers and sitemaps updated to match what now exists. This is the step usually skipped, and it is the one customers notice.

What you get

A cleaner site. The deletions and merges done, live, with the surviving pages edited so they hold the material worth keeping.

The change record. One spreadsheet with a row per page touched: what it was, what happened to it, where it now redirects, and the date. This is the document that answers the question “what happened to our page about X” two years from now, and it is worth more than it looks.

A verification pass. Every redirect requested and confirmed, every merged page read end to end, every menu checked. Delivered as a short note listing anything that could not be resolved and why.

An archive. The full text of every deleted page, kept as plain files, handed to you. Deleting is easier to approve when nothing is actually lost.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Victoria landscaping company has two hundred and sixty pages after a decade of publishing, including forty-one blog posts about spring planting written by four different people, nine pages about the same three services, and a whole section for a division sold off in 2019.

The pruning decision, made first, is that the forty-one spring posts become four proper guides, the nine service pages become three, and the sold division's twenty-two pages are deleted and redirected to a short note explaining where that business went. Cleanup then runs for nine working days. The four guides are assembled and re-edited so they read as single pieces. Seventy-eight pages come down, each with its own redirect. Two hundred and eleven internal links are repointed. Two menus and the footer are rewritten. Along the way it turns out that six of the sold division's pages were the most-visited pages on the site, which changes the decision: instead of deleting them, they are rewritten as general advice pages under the surviving business and kept. The change record is thirteen pages long and the owner keeps it.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How big the site is, whether a pruning list exists, and who has authority to approve a deletion. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Priced on the number of pages being touched, with merges counted separately from straight deletions because they take longer.
3. The approved list. Whatever list you have, turned into a working sheet with a destination against every removal, sent to you to sign off before anything is deleted. Nothing comes down without that.
4. The work. Five to fifteen working days for a few hundred pages, done in batches, with the archive taken before each batch.
5. Verification and handover. Redirects tested, links repointed, navigation checked, change record and archive delivered.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call, because the range is wide: a hundred straight deletions is a different job from forty merges that each need editing. The price depends on how many pages are being removed, how many are being merged, and whether the decisions have already been made. The pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see the shape of it. The number is fixed in writing before any page is touched, and the archive is taken first, so nothing is irreversible before you have approved it.

What happens next

A clear-out leaves three obvious follow-ons. A sweep for dead links a few weeks later catches the references that nobody predicted, including the ones in your own PDFs and email templates. The surviving pages, now carrying more weight, are usually worth bringing up to date one at a time. And a rule for when a page gets reviewed, refreshed, merged or deleted stops the pile rebuilding itself over the next decade. None of those is assumed. The cleanup is finished when the record and the archive are in your hands.