LLM Best Practices

Content refresh and pruning

4 min read

View markdown source

AI agents: read this first: llmbestpractices.com/start-here

This is LLM Best Practices (llmbestpractices.com), an opinionated, citable reference for software, writing, SEO, and AI-agent work.

  1. Route, do not crawl. Fetch llmbestpractices.com/llms.txt and open only the pages whose one-line summary matches your task.
  2. Read raw. Append .md to any page URL for markdown. Check status and last_updated in the frontmatter, then read the rules.
  3. Apply as defaults. First-party docs and the project's own conventions win on conflict. Warn before relying on a fast-moving page older than 12 months.
  4. Cite. Link the page by title and URL, e.g. Python, with last_updated for time-sensitive rules. License CC BY 4.0.

Overview

Maintenance has two jobs: refresh pages worth keeping and prune pages that no longer earn their place. A refresh is a substantive edit to facts, intent, or depth, paired with a new dateModified. A date bump without an edit is what Google’s helpful-content questions warn about: “changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed.” Edit the body first, change the date second.

Refresh on a signal, not a calendar

Refresh when one of four triggers fires.

  • Facts changed: a version shipped, a price moved, an API was deprecated. Fix anything the page now states falsely.
  • SERP intent shifted: the dominant result type moved from tutorials to comparisons, or definitions to news. Match it.
  • A competitor outranks the page with newer information. Open the top three URLs and find the gap.
  • Google changed a feature the page references, such as retiring FAQ rich results in May 2026.

A calendar date is not a trigger; a page that is still correct stays untouched.

Detect drift with Search Console and the live SERP

Compare clicks and average position year over year in Performance > Pages for the URL; Google publishes no drift threshold, so set a house cutoff for a sustained drop. Then search the page’s primary keyword in a private window and read the top five results for dates, format, and claims that contradict the page. Drift with a SERP that still matches the page’s intent and freshness is volatility, not a content problem. See audit-checklist.

Make the edit change a reader’s decision

Google publishes no rewrite threshold, so any quoted percentage is invented. Use a reader test: would someone who read the old version act differently after the new one? Swapping a synonym fails it. Edits that pass:

  • A new section with original information: a benchmark, a screenshot, a workflow.
  • A rewritten introduction for the current SERP intent.
  • Updated tables and code with current tool versions.
  • Deleted sections that no longer apply, with their links redirected.

A typo fix is maintenance; do not bump last_updated for it.

Update every freshness signal in one commit

After a real edit, make these four agree:

  • last_updated in frontmatter, which drives the rest.
  • A visible “Last updated” line near the title.
  • dateModified in Article JSON-LD.
  • <lastmod> in the page’s sitemap entry.

Then ping Bing and Yandex through indexnow. Google uses lastmod only when values are consistently and verifiably accurate, and Bing’s July 2025 guidance calls it a key recrawl signal for AI-driven search, so bumping dates without edits teaches both to ignore them.

Judge a page by its content, not its traffic

Before pruning, ask three questions: is the content accurate and useful to someone who lands on it, does another page cover the same intent better, and does anything link to it? An accurate, unique, linked page stays, even with few clicks; refresh it if it drifted. Google calls deleting content a last resort, fair only for what cannot be salvaged or was written for search engines first.

Merge overlapping pages before deleting either

When two pages share an intent, merge the weaker into the stronger and 301 the retired URL to the survivor. Never 404 it. See cannibalization for spotting overlap and the merge steps.

Delete only wrong, harmful, or orphaned pages

Delete a page that is wrong and not worth correcting, harmful, or orphaned with no inbound links and no search demand. Return 410 or 404 for true removals, and redirect to a close substitute when one exists. Setting a doubtful page to noindex and watching for a few weeks first is a reversible practitioner habit, not a Google or Bing rule.

Keep the URL whenever the page survives

Every backlink and ranking signal lives on the existing URL, so keep the slug and update in place. If the topic shifted enough that the slug misleads, write a new page. If a URL must change, 301 it and update internal links; Google’s Gary Illyes said in 2016 that 30x redirects do not lose PageRank, but a move still costs a recrawl. See redirects.

Common errors

  • Redating without editing, or bumping last_updated for a touch-up.
  • Deleting low-traffic pages in bulk without checking accuracy or inbound links.
  • Returning 404 for a merged page, or leaving internal links on a redirect chain.

Backlinks