BACKGROUND
This project was for a client in the B2B accounting software space. The goal was to introduce a formal content retirement process for a 186-piece archive where 41% of pieces contained at least partially outdated information and 28% were generating fewer than 10 organic sessions per month with no backlink equity worth preserving.
I built the framework around a six-dimension health scoring system that assigned every piece a score out of 12 and routed it into one of four review pathways. Pieces in the marginal performance range entered a four-question decision framework that determined the correct outcome across five paths: keep, update, merge, redirect, or delete. Special case handling covered the scenarios the standard framework couldn't cleanly resolve, including discontinued product features, superseded legislation, and content referenced in live sales materials.
The result was an 8-week implementation schedule for the full archive, a set of ongoing quarterly and annual review processes to prevent accumulation from recurring, and a documented rationale for every retirement decision that could be defended to internal stakeholders who remembered commissioning the content being removed.
