Thin/spun content or No content at all?

[William.Lau]

So I'm working on a site right now that has been plagued with spun/rewritten content..we are talking in the thousands.

Now would it be a smarter idea to just remove all the content or leave the content?

This is an ecommerce site and I'm tasking a few people to rewrite fresh authentic content. So all of the spun/thin content will be removed eventually.

The main question is to just delete it all right now or just replace as we go.

I'd like to know what you guys think.

[evolvingSEO]

In addition to what EGOL suggested, which is right on - you could also check to see which pages are indexed but not receiving traffic (for say the last 3 months). I would do this by crawling the site and comparing an export of your product pages to an export of your organic landing pages from analytics. Any products that Google has indexed, but not ranking or returning in search are good ones to noindex until you make them better.

-Dan

[EGOL]

There might not have been a manual spam action taken against the site but it could be suffering from a Panda problem from the thin content.

See information about Panda in Marine Haynes post here...

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

[William.Lau]

The site itself has valuable and authentic content EXCEPT product pages.

I've got in touch with the spam team at Google and there was no spam action taken on the site. However, I still feel the product pages are doing poorly since I Google the exact text in the product description without "" would not provide that product page...instead links to a article directory (spun content).

[EGOL]

I would look at the ratio of thin/duplicate content to rich/unique content.

Does your homepage and category pages have rich unique content right now?   If they do then you might noindex the product pages and hope that the pages that are still in the index recover.

Then start authoring the content that has the best potential to bring in search traffic.  Do that first and work your way down to the lower value pages.

If you have thin content everywhere.... I would reauthor my most valuable pages immediately, publish that then noindex the rest in priority of search traffic potential.

Before I put all of that work into a site, I would be sure that it doesn't have a Penguin or unnatural links problem.