Master Content Inventory

What this template is

A content inventory is the difference between guessing what to publish next and knowing what to fix first. This template is a single spreadsheet that holds every indexable URL on your site and scores each one on the four signals that actually predict whether a page earns its place: search intent, traffic, freshness, and cannibalization.

It’s built for the person who inherits a site with hundreds of pages and no map — the in-house lead doing a quarterly audit, the consultant scoping a first engagement, or the solo operator who suspects half their old posts are quietly competing with each other.

How it works

Every row is a URL. Every column is a signal. The sheet does the thinking the moment you finish filling it in.

• Pull the URL list — export from your CMS, sitemap, or a crawl, and paste the column in.
• Score the four signals — intent (info / comparative / transactional), traffic band, last-meaningful-update, and whether another URL targets the same query.
• Read the verdict — a formula collapses the four scores into one of four actions: keep, refresh, prune, or merge.

The point isn’t the spreadsheet. It’s that the spreadsheet forces a decision on every page, instead of letting the long tail of mediocre URLs accumulate unexamined.

# the action is a function of the four signals, not a gut call
def verdict(intent_fit, traffic, freshness, cannibalizes):
    if cannibalizes:            return "merge"
    if traffic == "none":       return "prune"
    if freshness == "stale":    return "refresh"
    return "keep"

Why it beats a one-off crawl

A crawler tells you what exists. It doesn’t tell you what to do. The inventory adds the layer a crawl can’t: a point of view on each page, expressed as an action you can assign and track.

A site doesn’t get strong by adding pages. It gets strong by deciding, page by page, which ones deserve to stay.

Run it once and you have a backlog. Run it every quarter and you have a system — one where pruning the dead weight makes the survivors rank better, and the internal-linking equity you reclaim compounds across everything that’s left.