Content Decay Diagnosis and Rewrite, Merge or Retire

Decay is five different problems wearing the same shape on a chart, and four of them are not fixed by rewriting the page. Before anything gets edited we sort the declining URLs by cause, and across the last three archives we ran this on, rewriting was the correct answer for roughly a fifth of them. The rest needed a merge, a redirect, a template change, or nothing at all. How we sort: We take the full query-URL history the property retains, cut into the period before and after each decline, per URL. Impressions flat with clicks down means the results page changed above you: an AI answer, an expanded feature block, a video carousel taking the top of the fold. Impressions down with average position steady means the queries themselves lost demand or the phrasing migrated. Position down against a stable query set means somebody overtook you, and we go and read what they did rather than guessing. Clicks that fall on a single date, sharply, are usually your own deploy, and we check the template diff and the server logs before anyone touches a sentence. The fifth cause: Two of your own URLs began competing for the same query and the traffic did not leave the site, it split. That is a merge rather than a refresh. We handle it here when it turns up incidentally, but a site showing a lot of it should buy the conflict audit instead and let this engagement work on what is left. What actually changes: Pages that get rewritten get rewritten hard: new argument, new evidence, new date, and a visible note saying what changed and when. We do not do the version where the year in the title is bumped, three sentences are swapped, and the page is called refreshed. Pages that lost to a results-page layout change get restructured to answer inside the first eighty words, or, where the answer is now given on the results page itself and the click is gone for good, get demoted in the internal link graph and left to age. Pages with no defensible reason to exist get folded into the page that should have covered the subject, with a redirect and a rewrite of every internal link pointing at the retired URL. What you receive: A cause-coded list of every declining URL, a decision per URL, the rewrite work itself for the pages that warrant it, and a deletion list. Every engagement produces a deletion list. On a consultancy site with nine years of archive it ran to roughly a third of the posts. It arrives with traffic and conversion figures per URL attached. We do not execute the deletions, and we expect you to argue about some of them; the argument is the part that produces a better decision than either side would have made alone. Not included: New topics. This engagement touches only URLs that already exist and have a click history to read. Link acquisition to prop up a page that lost position on merit. Technical remediation where the diagnosis lands on infrastructure — we hand your engineers a specific, reproducible finding and stop there rather than pretending to be your platform team. Not for you if: Your Search Console history runs shorter than a year, or the property was reconfigured recently and the data does not join across the break. Without the before, there is no decay to read and you are buying an expensive guess. Skip this too if the decline coincides with a site migration in the last six months. That is migration recovery, a different discipline with a different order of operations, and we do not do it.