Content decay

What it means

Content decay is the gradual loss of traffic to pages that used to perform. It happens because a competitor published something more complete, because the information aged, or because what searchers want from the query changed. It is a normal condition of any site more than a couple of years old, not a sign of neglect, and it operates continuously in the background.

Why site totals hide it

A site publishing regularly can show flat or rising traffic while most of its library declines, because new pages offset old ones. The problem only becomes visible when publishing slows, at which point the underlying trend appears all at once. This is why page-level year-on-year comparison is the only reliable way to see decay, and why a site total is a poor diagnostic.

Why buyers examine it closely

Decay answers a question a buyer cares about more than current traffic: what happens if they do nothing. A site with a stable library needs maintenance. A site whose total depends on publishing four posts a month to replace what is falling away needs a content operation, and that is a cost and a dependency. The two look identical in a traffic graph and are priced differently.

What to do before selling

Rank pages by traffic lost over the last twelve months, take the top ten, and update them properly: new figures, the sections competitors cover that you do not, a tightened introduction. Recovering a page that already has links and history is much faster than ranking a new one. Then keep the record of what you refreshed and what it recovered, because a documented recovery is evidence the library responds to work.