Content Decay Finder See which pages are losing clicks, and what changed.

What content decay is

Content decay is a page earning fewer organic clicks over time than it used to. It shows as a page whose clicks fall from one period to the next while the site as a whole may not.

A fall in clicks has more than one cause. Fewer impressions means the page is shown less; a worse position means it sits lower in the results; a lower CTR at the same position means fewer people choose it. Seasons, a changed results page and a technical fault can look the same on a chart. The signals beside each page help tell them apart.

How the finder reads your export

It pairs every page in the earlier period with the same page in the recent one, in your browser, with plain arithmetic and no model.

1. 1

   Pair the pages. A page is matched by its address with the #fragment dropped. A page missing from the recent period has no clicks in it.

2. 2

   Check the pages. A page is checked when it had at least 20 clicks in the earlier period, so a handful of clicks is not read as a trend.

3. 3

   Find the pages losing clicks. A page is decaying when it lost at least 10 clicks and its recent clicks are at most 80% of the earlier period’s.

4. 4

   Add the signals. Impressions Down, Position Worse and CTR Down at a Similar Position are shown where they hold, with the numbers for both periods. There is no score.

How to export from Search Console

The finder needs the Pages table for two periods.

1. 1

   One Compare export. In the Performance report, set the date range, choose Compare and pick the previous period (or the same period a year earlier), then open Export and choose Download CSV. Drop the ZIP.

2. 2

   Two exports. Export each period on its own, with the same filters and the same length, and drop both ZIPs. If the files do not say which period is earlier, the finder asks.

3. 3

   Queries too. The ZIP holds a Queries table as well. When it is there, the finder also lists the queries that lost clicks across the site.

What the finder cannot see

It reads one export. These things decide whether a page is really decaying, and none of them is in the file.

Seasonality

A page that peaks every winter will look like it decays every spring when two neighbouring periods are compared. Compare year over year for a site with seasons.

Which query lost the clicks

An export never crosses a page with its queries, so the queries losing clicks are listed for the whole site, not for each page.

Why the page lost them

The signals say what changed, not why. A competitor, a changed results page, a tracking fault or an update can each produce them.

Rows beyond the cap

A table stops at 1,000 rows. A page missing from the recent table may have been cut off rather than lost, and the finder says so.