toolkit

Content inventory · Playbook

Content Inventory & Audit Process — local playbook

Summary. How to act on a bibarel content inventory — what KEEP / UPDATE / PRUNE mean, and the process for turning the content-inventory.csv into a content plan. This is the local fallback; a team can point bibarel at a live Outline wiki (OUTLINE + OUTLINE_API_URL, collection via BIBAREL_WIKI_COLLECTION) to surface its own version instead.

Surfaced by. bibarel: the KEEP / UPDATE / PRUNE decision per URL, from word count, freshness, readability, and (with --gsc) Search Console traffic.

What the decisions mean

  • KEEP — fresh, readable, substantial, and (if traffic data is present) earning clicks. Leave it; revisit at the next audit.
  • UPDATE — the page has value but a fixable problem: it’s stale (past its type’s freshness threshold), reads too hard (grade > 14), has a low click-through rate (≥ 50 impressions, < 1% CTR), or is thin but not worth cutting. Refresh the content, then re-run the per-page skills (celebi for freshness, slowking for readability, cinccino for the snippet).
  • PRUNE — thin and low-value: very old, or (with GSC) no search traffic. Candidate to delete, redirect, or merge into a stronger page. Never bulk-delete from the CSV alone — confirm each.

Process

  1. Run the inventory with the right --type (so the freshness threshold matches the site) and, when you have it, --gsc gsc.json so traffic informs the call.
  2. Triage PRUNE first. For each: is there a better page to merge it into (301 the old URL there), or should it be deleted + redirected? Preserve any inbound links and rankings with a redirect (validate with abra).
  3. Queue UPDATE by impact. Prioritise pages with impressions but low CTR (demand exists, the page under-delivers) and stale pages that used to earn traffic. Hand each to the writer (smeargle draft / slowking / cinccino).
  4. Record the plan back in the CSV (a plan column) so the audit is auditable and repeatable.

Standards / policy

  • PRUNE is a proposal, not an action. A human confirms every deletion or merge; the redirect is part of the change, never an afterthought.
  • Thin ≠ prune. A short page that earns traffic or serves a clear intent is KEEP/UPDATE, not PRUNE — the 200-word floor is a signal, not a rule.
  • Re-audit on a cadence (e.g. quarterly for an active blog) so freshness and traffic decay are caught early, not in a once-a-year cleanup.