If you're the type of person who likes to hoard things "in case you need them" one day, then you should leave your habit at the door when you attempt to get better search engine rankings for your website.

According to commentator Gerry McGovern, bad or outdated content on a website is not good practice.

He provided an example of a website he was working on, where he discovered an old page with content "that was now clearly wrong and misleading".

However, the web manager of the business in question said that deleting it "will hurt our search engine optimisation".

This annoyed Mr McGovern somewhat: "Blindly, he believed that the more pages he had, and the more content he had on each of these pages, the more likely he was to get found in search engines.

"Bringing customers to a page with wrong content is like bringing customers into a car salesroom to show them your cars that won't start and have scratches all over the paintwork."

This web manager came in for a bit more abuse, including being called a search engine optimisation fanatic (one of many according to Mr McGovern), while coming up with excuses for bad content was likened to the beautification of a pig.

But is improving search rankings at the cost of quality content a common mistake?

Business Feet deliver targeted results through search engine optimisation