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Surfilby Adam Hafez

Pruning 200 blog pages lifted sessions 104%

Inflow's case study on HomeScienceTools.com: removing roughly 200 low-value blog pages preceded a 104% rise in sessions and 102% rise in transactions.

Published · 2 min read

Written byAdam Hafez
Tattooed hands pruning a bonsai tree with small scissors

Key takeaways

  • Agency Inflow recommended pruning, and the client's team removed, roughly 200 pages, about 10% of HomeScienceTools.com's blog, in early August 2018.
  • Pages were selected for removal based on having little or no organic traffic, pageviews, conversions, or backlinks.
  • Inflow reports a 104% increase in organic sessions and a 102% increase in transactions following the pruning.
  • The agency also reports a 64% increase in what it calls strategic content revenue over the same period.
  • The site's organic keyword footprint dipped slightly right after pruning, then grew substantially in the 90 days that followed, per the case study.

Inflow’s case study on client HomeScienceTools.com is one of the more specific published examples of content pruning on a real, named commercial site: it names the client, states a page count, and gives percentage changes in sessions, transactions and revenue rather than vague claims of “improvement.” We read the case study page directly and report only what it states.

What Inflow removed, and why

HomeScienceTools.com sells educational science products alongside a blog. In early August 2018, Inflow handed over its recommendations and the client’s team pruned roughly 200 blog pages, about 10% of the blog’s total page count. The case study says pages were targeted for having “little or no organic traffic, total pageviews, conversions, and backlinks”, the standard content-pruning criteria: pages that draw no search visits, get no reader engagement, convert nobody, and have no external links pointing at them. Separately, Inflow says it typically deindexes 5% to 20% of a store’s product and category pages after a full content audit.

The reported results

In the case study’s own words, the site saw a “104% increase in organic sessions” and a “102% increase in transactions” following the pruning. Inflow also reports a “64% increase in strategic content revenue” over the same period; the case study does not state when the measurement ended. It describes one interim wrinkle worth noting: the site’s organic keyword footprint “dropped slightly” immediately after the pages came down, before increasing substantially over the 90 days that followed. Inflow calls that dip-then-recovery pattern typical for pruning efforts.

What this evidence shows

This is Inflow’s own account of its own client engagement, published to promote its services, not an independent audit. The percentages are relative to the site’s pre-pruning baseline rather than stated as absolute session or revenue counts, and no external analytics platform is cited to confirm them. What makes it usable evidence, rather than just another marketing claim, is the specificity: a named site, a stated page count, a stated month, and four distinct metrics reported in the same piece, including one, the keyword footprint dip, that runs against the agency’s own headline result before it recovers. A case study that only reported wins would be easier to dismiss.

Brandy Hansen, then marketing director at the client, is quoted in the piece calling the audit “timely, necessary, and strategic,” which is the kind of attributed quote that at least ties the account to a named person at the client company, rather than leaving it anonymous.

The evidence

Subject
HomeScienceTools.com blog content pruning
Timeframe
From August 2018
Verified
Yes, against first-party data
Measured change
MetricBeforeAfter
Blog pages prunedfull blog page countroughly 200 pages removed (about 10% of the blog)
Organic sessionspre-pruning baseline%up 104%%
Transactionspre-pruning baseline%up 102%%
Strategic content revenuepre-pruning baseline%up 64%%

Sources

  1. 1.Content Pruning Case Study: Deleting Pages to Boost SEO - InflowPrimary

Common questions

Who ran this content pruning project and on which site?

Digital marketing agency Inflow recommended the pages to prune for its client HomeScienceTools.com, an online store selling educational science products, and the client's team removed them. Inflow published the case study on its own site.

How many pages were removed, and on what basis?

Roughly 200 pages, about 10% of the blog, chosen for having little or no organic traffic, total pageviews, conversions, or backlinks, according to the case study.

What results does the case study report?

A 104% increase in organic sessions and a 102% increase in transactions, plus a 64% increase in what Inflow calls strategic content revenue, measured after the pruning in early August 2018, over a period the case study does not state. The organic keyword footprint dipped slightly right after pruning, then grew substantially over the following 90 days.

Are these numbers independently audited?

No. They are the agency's own reported figures from its own analytics access to a client account, published as marketing material for Inflow's services, not verified by a third party or by Google.

About the author

Adam Hafez
Adam Hafez

Founder, UpgradIQ FZC LLC

Adam Hafez works on technical SEO and search measurement: how pages get crawled, indexed, ranked and now quoted by answer engines. He founded UpgradIQ, which reads Google Search Console and GA4 to tie ranking movement back to the changes that caused it. He publishes what the data supports and states the limits of it.

  • Technical SEO
  • Search Console and GA4
  • Answer engine optimization
  • Structured data

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