The debt you didn't know you were taking on
Every page you publish is a commitment. You're telling Google that this URL exists, contains useful information, and deserves to appear in search results. You're telling users that if they land here, they'll find what they came for.
Most organizations honor that commitment for about 18 months. After that, the page gets left behind. The product it described changed. The policy it referenced was updated. The event it promoted happened two years ago. But the page stays live, because nobody got around to deleting it, and nobody wants to touch a URL that might have inbound links.
Multiply that by two years of publishing activity and you have content debt: a growing backlog of pages that are no longer earning their place on your site.
Content debt isn't just a housekeeping problem. It's a technical and strategic liability that actively undermines your SEO performance, your editorial credibility, and your team's ability to maintain a coherent website.
What content debt looks like in practice
Content debt comes in four main forms. Most sites have all four at once.
Outdated content
Pages that were accurate at publication but no longer reflect current information: old pricing pages, superseded policy documents, product feature descriptions that no longer match the product, staff profile pages for people who left years ago. These pages erode user trust when real people land on them, and they send mixed signals to search engines about the authority of your site.
Duplicate and near-duplicate content
When multiple pages cover the same topic without meaningfully distinguishing themselves, they compete with each other for search rankings and dilute the total authority that could be concentrated in a single strong page. This often happens organically: two different writers cover similar topics without coordinating, or an older article never gets consolidated with a newer, more comprehensive one.
Orphaned URLs
Pages with no inbound internal links from the rest of the site. Search engine crawlers discover pages by following links. An orphaned page either won't be crawled regularly or won't receive link equity from the rest of your site. These pages are also invisible to users navigating normally. They exist in a kind of limbo: live, indexed (maybe), and functionally useless.
Broken internal links
Links on your pages that point to URLs that no longer exist: pages you deleted without redirecting, URLs that changed after a redesign, or external pages that went offline. Broken links are a crawl efficiency drain, a user experience failure, and a mild trust signal to search engines.
How content debt accumulates
Content debt is almost never intentional. It builds in three stages.
Stage one: growth without governance. A team publishes consistently but has no content model, no review schedule, and no ownership policy. Every new page gets more effort than maintaining existing ones, because new content is visible work and maintenance is invisible.
Stage two: restructuring without cleanup. A CMS migration, a rebrand, or a site reorganization changes URL structures, merges departments, or archives entire sections. The new site launches without solving for the old content. Three hundred pages end up in a legacy folder nobody checks.
Stage three: turnover. Institutional knowledge about why certain pages exist, what they're connected to, and who owns them walks out the door when staff leave. New team members don't know what they've inherited and are hesitant to delete anything in case it matters.
By stage three, content debt has compound interest. Every new page published adds to a base of existing pages that nobody is responsible for, each one quietly degrading your site's overall quality signal.
Why content debt hurts SEO
Google's quality assessment of a website isn't purely about your best pages. It's about the overall impression of your content across the whole domain. A cluster of thin, outdated, or duplicated pages drags down that assessment for everything else on the site.
Specific SEO mechanisms content debt disrupts:
Crawl budget: Large sites have a finite crawl budget, the number of URLs a search engine will crawl in a given period. Outdated and orphaned pages consume crawl budget without contributing value, meaning important new pages may get crawled less frequently.
Link equity dilution: Internal links pass authority from page to page. When your pages link to low-value content, that's equity flowing somewhere it shouldn't. Consolidating debt frees up link equity to concentrate on your best content.
Keyword cannibalization: Multiple pages targeting the same keyword compete against each other rather than reinforcing one authoritative page. Google has to choose which page to rank, and it often chooses the wrong one.
Freshness signals: Google rewards freshness for queries where recency matters. A site with many old, unmodified pages sends a signal that content maintenance isn't a priority.
The maintenance rhythm that prevents accumulation
The solution to content debt isn't a one-time audit (though you do need one of those first). It's a maintenance rhythm that becomes part of normal operations.
Here's a sustainable model for most content teams:
At publication: Every new page gets an owner, a review date (12 months is standard), and a content type tag. These three fields should be required in your CMS, not optional. If you can't assign ownership at publication, you'll never be able to assign it retroactively.
Monthly: A 30-minute review of pages flagged by your CMS as past their review date. For each flagged page: is the information still accurate? Does the page still serve a real audience need? Update, redirect, or archive accordingly.
Quarterly: A broken link scan using a free tool like Broken Link Checker or Screaming Frog's limited free version. Repair or redirect anything that returns a 404 or 301 chain.
Annually: Full content audit using the four-bucket triage framework. Review the past year's publishing output, identify duplicate and near-duplicate content, process the consolidation queue.
By trigger: Any time a service changes, a policy is updated, a staff member leaves, or a URL structure changes, run a targeted check of affected pages before and immediately after the change.
Making content debt visible to decision-makers
One reason content debt persists is that it's invisible in reporting. Nobody is measuring "pages that are past due for review" or "percentage of internal links that are broken." Leadership sees page count as a vanity metric (more pages means more content, which feels good) rather than a liability.
Changing this requires putting debt metrics on a dashboard. Useful measures to track monthly:
These four numbers can be pulled in under an hour each month. When leadership sees that 40% of the site's pages have had zero traffic in the past year, the conversation about content maintenance becomes much easier.
A quick-start maintenance checklist
If you're starting from a site with existing debt and no current process, here's where to begin:
Content debt compounds silently. The earlier you start paying it down, the less interest you'll owe.
If your site has accumulated more content than your team can reasonably manage, get in touch and we can figure out the right place to start.