I was trying to see the impact on rankings and traffic that the removal of content would have. My theory was that if we blocked the pages from being crawled, Google would have to rely on the link signals alone to rank the content. However, I don’t think what I saw was actually the impact of removing the content. Maybe it is, but I can’t say that with 100% certainty, as the impact feels too small. I’ll be running another test to confirm this. The Story of My new plan is to delete the content from the page and see what happens.
My working theory
Is that Google may still be using the content it used to see on the page to rank it. Google Search Advocate John Mueller has confirmed this behavior in the past. So far, the company data test has been running for nearly five months. At this point, it doesn’t seem like Google will stop ranking the page. I suspect, after a while, it will likely stop trusting that the content that was on the page is still there, but I haven’t seen evidence of that happening. Keep reading to see the test setup and impact. You can see some drop in the impressions, but a larger drop in the number of clicks for the articles.
The Story of individual
Is that Google may still be using the content it used to see on the page to rank it. Google Search Advocate John Mueller has confirmed this behavior in the past. So far, the company data test has been running for nearly five months. At this point, it doesn’t seem like Google will stop ranking the page. I suspect, after a while, it will likely stop trusting that the content that was on the page is still there, but I haven’t seen evidence of that happening. Keep reading to see the test setup and impact. You can see some drop in the impressions, but a larger drop in the number of clicks for the articles.
