These days, I'll go to great lengths to not have to prune my content.

It's annoying.

It seems like a waste of good money when in most cases you can revive a piece of content without too much difficulty.

The same thing goes for total rewrites. I'd prefer not to pay for the article twice when there's no guarantee it'll turn out better the next time.

Basically, my approach for reviving content will change based on the template that was used for the original post. Not every template utilizes the same elements or structure, so it has to.

If all else fails then I'll begrudgingly take the post down, do a redirect, and decide later if it is worth rewriting or simply republishing with a different URL (sometimes that works too).

That can take a lot of time when you're as stubborn as me.

So it's a rare thing on my sites that it actually happens, but I got pretty close recently with one particular post that wouldn't index even after following many of the approaches that worked on other pieces of content.

It seemed like it was time to remove the stubborn pile o' dung because I'm a firm believer that the content Google doesn't like will eventually drag down everything else with it, probably in some core update, or even more likely it'll suffocate growth until you're red in the face bleeping at the monitor wondering why your awesome site isn't doing as well as those idiot competitors, Beavis and Butthead.

I decided to give it one more go and it finally indexed. I wanted to fist pump the room. The changes themselves weren't remarkable but did include adding a conclusion and a table of contents to a 600-or-so-word post.

Within a couple of days, the post not only indexed but picked up a decent number of impressions which tells me it's going to perform well later. With an average position of 11.3, that's not so bad for a post that wouldn't index for love nor money before.

The majority of the content wasn't changed at all which tells you how fickle the algorithm can be.

So what's the lesson this week? Patience and persistence? Not really.

I'd probably advise you to start going through content that you've ignored instead. Start adding things that you know Google might want to see. It might surprise you what a few changes can actually do. Then you can test repeating that process on other pieces of content with similar issues.

There's so much growth to be unlocked when you look at the assets you already have, it's not always about publishing more.