The other day at SMX East, Gary Illyes from Google stirred the pot with SEOs by saying pruning content is not a good strategy to help with Panda issues. So Glenn Gabe submitted this question to John Mueller of Google to get his take on how Gary answered the question. In fact, Gary said the strategy of pruning content to recover from Panda filters should not work and probably should never have worked.

Most of what Gary said went against much of what SEOs have been practicing for the past several years since Panda launched. Hence the concern.

So John Mueller basically said Gary was wrong by saying both pruning and improving content are “valid strategies.” John explained it is always preferred to improve your content but if you cannot do that then removing the content is fine.

He answered this question at the 6:22 mark into the video, here is the embed:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at Twitter.