It’s time for some spring cleaning.  Get out your mops and buckets, and let’s work on cleaning up that website!

Did you know that it’s possible to improve your rank on Google without creating content, blogging, or uploading anything new?  All it takes is cleaning up links and pages that Google could view as low-quality.

Google wants the best experience for their searchers.  So when your site is full of broken links and useless pages, it may be pushed down in the search results.  Cleaning up these issues can give you a bit of a boost.

Let’s talk about a few things you can work on.

Fix broken links

Almost every website I audit has a ton of broken links, and the website owner doesn’t even know.

What’s a broken link?  A link on your site that leads to a page that doesn’t exist.  That could be a page on your own site or a page on another website.

To find them, I recommend using a tool to scan your website (no need to open every page and click every link manually—yikes!).  I like BrokenLinkCheck.com as a free one or Ubersuggest’s Site Audit for a more robust tool.

If you like video instructions, watch my YouTube video on Broken Links. In 7 minutes, I show examples of broken links, how to find them, and how to fix them.

What if I have a zillion broken links??

BrokenLinkCheck.com or Ubersuggest will give you a list of all the broken links on your website.  If your site has been around for a while and has a lot of content… there are probably a lot of broken links.

If you don’t have time to fix them all, look for any broken links that appear over and over again.  This might be a broken link in your navigation menu, sidebar, or footer.  When you have a broken link in one of those places, it actually exists on every page of your site.  Those are the ones to clean up first!

How do I clean up broken links?

You have a few options for fixing broken links:

• Un-link the text if the destination page no longer exists
• Correct the link if it was just mis-typed or formatted wrong (like it doesn’t start with https:// or https://)
• Correct the link if the destination page has changed
• Create a redirect if the broken link is on your site (like if you changed your Contact page URL from /contact to /inquire, and now links to /contact are broken everywhere)

Delete old, short blog posts

Google wants to rank sites that are full of great, helpful information.  Having a lot of pages or posts without much on them can hurt your ranking, as those posts might be considered thin content.

In auditing wedding websites, the thin content I usually find is old, short blog posts that are used like announcements.  Have you written posts like these?:

• “We’re hiring!  Apply here”
• “This wedding we planned/photographed was featured on BRIDES.com.  Click over there for the article!”
• “I will be speaking at the XYZ Conference in March.”

In general, I recommend that your blog posts have at least 200 words to avoid thin content.  These “announcement” type posts are a better fit for social media, or maybe a dedicated “Press” page on your website.

What do I do with short blog posts?

You have two options for eliminating thin content, one basic and one more advanced.

If you don’t need that post anymore, just delete it.  You could also switch it to “Draft” if you want to keep it in your website dashboard for sentimental reasons.

I often suggest redirecting URLs that you delete. That said, thin, low-value content usually isn’t getting significant links or traffic, so this is a case where redirects are less necessary. You can let those URLs result in a 404 error, as long as you clean up any links to those posts on your site (otherwise, you’ll end up with broken links– see above).

If you still want the post published, change it to no-index.  This is a more techy option.  When you “noindex” a page, you’re using a bit of code to tell Google not to include that page in the search results.

Using no-index is our way of telling Google “Don’t take a look at this post or rank it.”  Google will not take that page into consideration when ranking your site.  That means the post can stay on your blog, and it won’t hurt your ranking or site quality.

Here are instructions on how to no-index a page using Yoast plugin on WordPress and on Squarespace.

Delete useless tags

A third step in your spring cleanup is to delete useless tags on your blog.

A some point in the distant past, someone told wedding vendors that more tags on your blog is better.  This is absolutely not true.

Read more here: How to Use Categories and Tags on a Wedding Blog

Instead of helping, having dozens or hundreds of blog posts may actually be hurting your site. Your blog tags might actually be creating thin content on your website (and harming your SEO rankings).

Every time you add a new tag, your website platform creates a tag archive page, showing the posts that use that tag.  Here’s an example:

So if your blog has hundreds of tags… you probably have hundreds of low-quality tag pages.

How do I clean up my tags?

In both WordPress and Squarespace, you can find a list of all the tags you’ve used on your blog.

In WordPress, navigate to Posts > Tags

In Squarespace, go to Pages > click the gear next to your main blog page > click Advanced > click Manage Tags

Once you’re looking at your list of all tags, ask yourself about each tag:

• Does this tag help group similar posts together?
• Does this tag apply to multiple posts on my blog?
• Is this tag spelled correctly/does it make sense?

If the answer is no, delete the tag.

What if I have a bazillion tags?

Say that you have so many tags that cleaning them up individually would take forever.  In that case, I would recommend no-indexing all tag pages.

This is a significant change and should be done carefully.  You may want to contact an SEO expert for help and to make sure this change won’t actually remove tags that are driving significant traffic.

Let’s get cleaning!

Those are just a few things you can do to clean up your website.  I recommend returning to this list once a year (spring cleaning, maybe?) and checking in on your broken links, short content, and tags.

This post was originally published on May 14, 2020. It was significantly updated on April 2, 2026.

*Note that the link to Ubersuggest above is an affiliate link, and we may make a commission if you choose to sign up for the tool. (thank you!)