Writing high-quality content is a great idea. But writing just to publish something? That’s not always smart, and in many cases, it can actually hurt your SEO. With the rise of AI-generated content, it’s easier than ever to churn out article after article. But easy doesn’t mean effective. At Progress Planner, we want to support sustainable SEO strategies. That means encouraging you to publish content that adds real value, not content for the sake of content. That’s why, in our latest update, we’ve made a small but important change to the plugin.

Content pruning: sometimes less is more

In SEO, content pruning refers to the process of removing low-quality, outdated, or irrelevant content from your website. It might sound counterintuitive, but deleting content can actually improve your rankings.

Why? Because Google rewards quality over quantity. If your site is filled with thin or outdated articles, it becomes harder for search engines (and users) to find the pages that do matter. By removing what’s no longer useful, you make room for better performance.

This is especially important in today’s AI-saturated content landscape. As more websites flood the internet with semi-generic, keyword-loaded articles, the truly useful and relevant pages stand out even more.

The web is full and Google knows it

The internet is overflowing with information. For almost every topic imaginable, thousands, if not millions, of articles compete for attention. In many niches, the competition is so intense that ranking on the first page of Google has become incredibly difficult.

That’s why simply publishing more content, or creating multiple variations of the same article, is no longer a viable strategy. Google has become much smarter at recognizing when content is overlapping, repetitive, or just slightly rewritten. It’s no longer about the volume of articles; it’s about their value in context.

Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving to deal with this flood of content. It has to. Search engines now work harder to surface original, authoritative and unique information and to filter out thin or redundant pages. For content creators, this means the bar is higher than ever. You don’t just need to write: you need to contribute something genuinely useful.

Need some tips on how to create valuable content? Make sure to read our post on how to create unique content.

What this means for Progress Planner

From the beginning, we built Progress Planner to support content creators and website owners in building better-performing sites. But we never meant to suggest that more content equals better results. Unfortunately, some of our features, like our copywriting badges, may have unintentionally sent that message.

So we’ve made three changes, we’ve:

1. Removed the copywriting badges from the plugin.
2. Changed the ‘Content Published’ graph to ‘Content Managed’ to better reflect the full cycle of publishing, improving and pruning.
3. Changed the ‘create a new post’ into ‘create valuable content’

Our goal is to encourage thoughtful, effective content strategies. Not just hitting a word count.

Don’t game the system

SEO isn’t about gaming the system. It’s about delivering real value. And sometimes, that means hitting “delete” instead of “publish.” At Progress Planner, we’ll continue to develop tools that help you focus on what truly matters: quality, clarity and usefulness, for users and for search engines. Have thoughts about content pruning or SEO in the AI era? Let us know; we’re always happy to discuss things.