Content decay: refresh, consolidate or prune

Every page starts dying the day you publish it: competitors ship newer takes, information goes stale, Google's freshness preference kicks in. Decay is the default state of content — growth is what happens when your refresh rate beats your decay rate. Sites that only ever add pages end up as graveyards where the dead weight drags down the living.

Detect it before the traffic is gone

In Search Console, compare the last 6 months against the previous 6, per page:

• Clicks down, position down → classic decay, act on it.
• Position stable, CTR down → the SERP changed around you (AI Overview, new features) — a title/intent problem, not a content one.
• Impressions down across a whole cluster → demand shift or a sitewide quality issue.

Keep a content inventory (a spreadsheet is fine): URL, target query, last real update, 6-month click trend. Review quarterly — the same cadence as your orphan-page audit.

The four verdicts

For each decaying page, pick one deliberately:

1. Update — topic still has demand, page still ranks somewhere on pages 1–2. Refresh facts and screenshots, cover the follow-up questions searchers now ask, cut dead sections. Real changes only, then an honest dateModified and a re-index request in GSC.
2. Consolidate — three thin posts circling one topic split their authority and cannibalize each other. Merge into the strongest URL, 308 the losers to it, update internal links to point at the winner directly.
3. Prune — no demand, no links, no conversions, no salvage value. Return 410 (or 404) and remove from the sitemap. Post-Helpful-Content, a mass of zero-value pages measurably suppresses the whole domain; deleting can lift what remains.
4. Leave alone — stable evergreen performers. Don't churn them for the sake of a fresher date; cosmetic edits with a bumped dateModified are the fastest way to teach Google your dates lie.

Updating that actually recovers rankings

The pages worth the most effort are the almost-winners: queries sitting at positions 5–15 in GSC. For each: what do the top 3 have that you lack (data? screenshots? a table? freshness?), close that gap, strengthen internal links to the page with descriptive anchors, and give it two–four weeks before judging. Track updated pages in the inventory — the before/after click delta tells you whether your refresh playbook works.

Checklist:

• Quarterly GSC decay review: 6-month click/position deltas per page
• Content inventory maintained with last-real-update dates
• Every decaying page gets an explicit verdict: update / consolidate / prune / leave
• Consolidations ship with 308s and internal-link updates in the same change
• dateModified bumped only for substantive edits; refresh results measured