Content Decay Diagnosis and Refresh Programme

About half of what gets reported as content decay is not decay. Of the pages clients send us, a little over forty per cent come back on a do-not-touch list, because the query moved to a page type the URL cannot be, or two of your own pages started trading positions, and editing the text would have changed nothing. Diagnosis comes first, and it is the part worth paying for. Diagnosis first: We need Search Console at page and query dimension across the full sixteen months, and we compare each losing URL against a dated SERP pull rather than against its own history alone. A page that lost half its clicks while its position held is a different problem from one that fell four places, and both are different again from one whose entire result set changed shape. The six causes we separate: Page-type displacement, where the top ten now rewards a format your URL is not. Intent drift, where the query itself began meaning something else. Self-cannibalisation, which usually dates to the week you published something adjacent. Link erosion, where the referring domains that carried the page have gone. Product or version drift, where the page is simply no longer true. And the one most often misread, a seasonal trough or a single event treated as a trend, where the correct action is none. What ships: A per-URL verdict with the cause named and the evidence attached. For pages worth fixing, an edit specification: what changes, what stays, which sections are removed, which claims need re-sourcing, and whether the URL survives or redirects. For merges, the target URL, the redirect map and the internal links that must move with it. For retirements, the list and the argument, because the argument is what you will need internally. Developer-tools decay: Documentation and tutorials decay against version numbers rather than against calendars. A tutorial written for version three does not gradually lose relevance; it becomes wrong on a release date and holds its ranking for a while afterwards, which is worse than losing it. We map content to the versions it assumes, so the refresh trigger is a release rather than a quarterly review. Not included: We do not republish with a fresh date and call it a refresh, we do not add sections to reach a length, and we do not swap the year in a title. No link acquisition to rescue a page that lost its referring domains: if that is the cause, the honest answer is that it belongs to a different budget line and a different supplier. Implementation in your CMS is yours unless we agree otherwise in writing. Do not hire us for: Estates under roughly two hundred indexed URLs, where the whole thing can be read manually and a consultant at this rate adds process rather than insight. Sites where traffic fell across every page in the same week, which is a technical or algorithmic event and needs a different investigation before any content work makes sense. And organisations that cannot redirect or delete, because the largest single gain on most decayed estates is consolidation, and with that blocked the remaining work does not justify the fee. Rhythm: On retainer we re-diagnose monthly and work a rolling list rather than an annual audit, since decay arrives continuously and audits arrive once. Each month closes with a one-page note covering what we changed, what moved, and what we predicted wrongly, which is the section clients read first.