Definition
Content pruning is the process of reviewing a website's existing pages and updating, merging, redirecting or removing those that are outdated, thin, duplicated or getting no traffic. The goal is a smaller set of stronger pages that better serve visitors.
Why it matters for law firms
Many law firm blogs contain years of short, near-identical posts written for keywords rather than clients. Google evaluates overall site quality, so large amounts of low-value content can hold back the pages that matter.
Example
A personal injury firm has 40 short posts about car accidents in different years. It merges them into five comprehensive guides, redirects the old URLs, and sees the merged guides outrank all of the originals.
How to improve it
- Export all URLs with their traffic, rankings and backlinks.
- Update pages that are relevant but outdated.
- Merge overlapping posts and 301-redirect the old URLs.
- Remove pages with no value, no traffic and no links.
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Legal Content Writing
Aditya Chauhan
Head of SEO, PageOne Lawyers
Last updated September 26, 2026