Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?

[xpers]

I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/

It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings.

When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve.

I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website?

Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.

[dohertyjf]

This is a very valid question, in my opinion, and one that I have thought about a lot. I even did it on a site before on a UGC section where there were about 30k empty questions, many of which were a reputation nightmare for the site. We used the parameters of:

• Over a year old
• Has not received an organic visit in the past year

We 410d all of them as they did not have any inbound links and we just wanted them out of the index. I believe they were later 301d, and that section of the site has now been killed off.

Directly after the pages were removed, we saw a lift of ~20% in organic traffic to that section of the site. That maintained, and over time that section of the site started getting more visits from organic as well.

I saw it as a win and went through with it because:

• They were low quality
• They already didn't receive traffic
• By removing them, we'd get more pages that we wanted crawled, crawled.

I think Gary's answer of "create more high quality content" is too simplistic. Yes, keep moving forward in the direction you are, but if you have the time or can hire someone else to do it, and those pages are not getting traffic, then I'd say remove them. If they are getting traffic, maybe do a test of going back and making them high quality to see if they drive more traffic.

Good luck!

[BradsDeals]

Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.

Things not addressed in that thread:

• If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
• The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
• Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
• The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.

[MattAntonino]

Haha I read this question earlier, saw the post come across feedly and knew what I needed to do with it. Just a matter of minutes. You're right though - I would've probably said remove earlier as well. It's a toss up but usually when they clarify, I try to follow. (Sometimes they talk nonsense of course, but you just have to filter that out.)

[TimHolmes]

Just pipped me to it

[TimHolmes]

Hi Xpers.

I was reading a very timely, if not the same issue article today from Barry Schwartz over at SEO Round Table. He has been following a conversation from Gary Illyes at Google, whom apparently does not recommend removing content from a site to help you recover from a Panda issue, but rather recommends increasing the number of higher quality pages etc.

If you are continuing to get more traffic by adding your new larger higher quality articles, I would simply continue in the same vein. There is no reason why you cannot still continue to share your content on social platforms too.

In the past I may have suggested removing some thin/outsdated content and repointing to a newer more relevant piece, but in light of this article I now may start to think a tad differently. Hopefully some of the other Mozzers might have more thoughts on Barry's post too.

Here is the article fresh off the press today - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html

[MattAntonino]

Google's Gary Illyes basically just answered this on Twitter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-fix-content-21006.html

"We don't recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff"

So rather than spend a lot of time on old work, move forward and improve. If there's terrible stuff, I'd of course remove it. But if it's just not super-high quality, I would do as Gary says in this instance and work on new things.

Truthfully, getting Google to recrawl year or two or five stuff can be tough. If they don't recrawl it you don't even get the benefit until they do, if there were a benefit. Moving forward seems to make more sense to me.