💀⚰️🪦 IBM deleted tens of thousands of pages (and survived) -- SEM Daily 5.22.23
an enterprise-SEO-focused edition of the SEM Daily
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is about how IBM.com removed tens of thousands of pages from the website.
and also this:
Some other insights from further down the thread:
the changes helped "modestly" with SEM metrics.
about 20% of the pages were "insight/thought leader" content
"We had traffic, web conversion and then deeper funnel MQL data for every page. Any page that was important on any of those KPIs we made sure we either kept or had a confident plan for."
Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first, a word from our sponsor:
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My Take
This one is for my friends in the “enterprise” section of the SEO bleachers.
As a barely-employable SEO… that is not me.
But if it’s you: this is probably a pretty cool thread. IBM killing tens of thousands of its pages and not only did they NOT take a hit in the SERPs, organic traffic is up (slow and steadily):
Pretty cool.
In general, enterprise-level giant SEO-focused projects seem, at best, not something people are inclined to share publicly, so it’s extra cool to see this thread from the Director of Digital at IBM.com.
The full thread is chock-full of other stuff I barely understand or care about, like getting management buy-in on a project and etc.
As for me, I especially like the part about redirecting the URLs they were killing to relevant pages. When I acquire sites or aged domain rebuilds, this is the exact thing I’m trying to emulate, so… cool to see such a large a real-world example.
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
sem@hey.com
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