I Deleted the Content From Two Posts To See if They’d Still Rank. Here’s What Happened

I removed content from two of our pages to try to measure the impact that content has on rankings. We lost a few positions for many terms, and it hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. These pages still ranked relatively well without any content.

You can see the current content for these pages on the blog (top Bing searches, top YouTube searches). Both have 1-2K words and tons ofdata.

Here’s how they looked during thetest:

If you’ve been reading our blog, you may have seen my first attempt at measuring the impact of content. I blocked the same pages from being crawled with robots.txt, thinking this would take the content out of the ranking equation. The impact was minor enough that I wasn’t sure if my test was actually successful.

My theory, based on a comment from Google Search Advocate John Mueller, was that they may still be using the old content to rank the page. Here’s what hesaid:

I don’t think I can rule that out with this test either. The impact feels too small. It’s possible they’re still using the content that used to be on the page to rank it, or they may just be ranking because of the links to thepage.

Either way, here’s what I did and what happened.

Test setup

This was a pretty simple setup. I simply deleted the content of the posts in WordPress and republished them.

I deleted the content from these two posts on August 8th and restored it on August 20th:

Results

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