The deliberate removal, consolidation, or noindexing of low-value pages on a site to lift the overall quality signal. Symptoms that a site needs pruning include thousands of thin tag-archive pages, near-duplicate product variants, expired job listings, or auto-generated programmatic pages with no traffic. Options for each pruned URL include 301-redirecting to a stronger page, merging content into a canonical version, returning
410 Gone, or applying noindex. Frequently associated with recovery from Google's Helpful Content Update and core updates, where site-wide quality assessments matter more than per-page signals.