There is probably something on your website you keep finding reasons not to remove.
Maybe it was the first page you wrote yourself. Maybe it took weeks of back and forth to finally feel right. It gets almost no traffic. It has never produced a lead. And every time you review the site, you scroll past it and keep moving.
That is a darling. And most business websites are keeping several of them.
“Kill your darlings” is a phrase from writing and filmmaking. When MGM edited The Wizard of Oz, they cut the Jitterbug, a fully choreographed musical number, because the movie was running too long. The work mattered. The effort was real. But the finished product was better without it.
Most businesses handle these calls less decisively. A lot of SEO advice encourages that: never delete pages, never cut content, it’ll tank your rankings. That advice is useful when a page has value. A page with traffic, backlinks, rankings, conversions, or strategic importance should not be casually removed. But it becomes bad advice when applied to content that was never earning its place.
What a darling actually costs you
Search engines evaluate individual pages, but they also build a broader picture of your site: what it covers, how consistently useful it is, and whether people find what they need when they land there. One weak page will not automatically ruin your site. But thin pages, dead-end pages, outdated pages, and pages with no clear audience can dilute the signals your stronger pages are trying to send.
Your darlings are not always sitting quietly in a corner. Sometimes they are making the site harder to understand. The attachment is the problem, not the content. Once the reason something stays on your site shifts from “it is working” to “I made it,” it has become a darling. At that point, it is earning its place on sentiment, not performance.
You have options
Cutting is not the only move, but something has to happen.
Before you remove anything, check whether the page has traffic, backlinks, rankings, conversions, internal links, or strategic value. If it has none of those, the question is no longer whether you can justify removing it. It is whether you can justify keeping it.
Consolidation is often the right call: pull what matters from two or three underperforming pages, build one stronger page, and redirect the old URLs. Sometimes a page just needs to be rewritten from the audience’s perspective rather than the business’s. Same topic, different frame. And sometimes the right answer is to take it down, redirect it to the nearest relevant destination, and stop sending signals you do not want to send.
The specific action matters less than refusing to let the page sit there unchanged.
MGM’s editors did not cut the Jitterbug because they stopped valuing what went into it. They made the call because the finished product was better without it. Your darlings deserve the same honest question: is this serving the site, or is it just surviving on your attachment to it?
If the answer is the latter, you have options. But don’t let the options become a reason to do nothing.
