What Should I Do With Low Quality Content?

[sbrault74]

As my site has definitely got hit by Panda, I am in the process of cleaning my website of low quality content.

Needless to say, shitty articles are completed being removed but I think lots of this content is now of low quality because it is obsolete and dated.

So what should I do with this content?

Should I rewrite those articles as completely new posts and link from the old posts to the new ones? Or should I delete the old posts and do a 301 redirect to the new post?

Or should I rewrite the content of these articles in place so I can keep the old URL and backlinks?

One thing is that I've got a lot more followers than I used to so publishing a new post gets a lot more views, like and shares and whatnot from social networks.

[Carson-Ward]

I wouldn't re-write old posts. If they can be refreshed or added to with recent updates go ahead and redirect (if it can be redirected without losing any additional info) or link to the new version.

Things get tricky if there's nothing new that can be written about the post. First, kill the really bad stuff, as Mike suggested, and keep the good stuff. The stuff on the borderline is probably not worth keeping unless it was still receiving traffic. In my experience with Panda, using 410s on bad pages is better than redirecting, but you will probably want to 301 redirect to the next-best page if you have good links.

If it was still receiving organic traffic, think about what you can do to make it better or provide additional resources and reading. Try to save traffic-generating pieces by improving them and making them useful to the people who were landing on them. For high-traffic pieces, you will want to look at the organic keywords and make sure the page somehow answers the query.

As always with Panda, make sure your design doesn't turn people off and that you're not filling the template with too many ads.

[jesse-landry]

No 404's are fine they will just not pass link juice and Google will eventually stop following them but ideally they will phase out regardless as the internet moves along.

[sbrault74]

And what about real crappy content? If I delete it, I end up with lots of 404 errors. Does that pose a problem to Google?

[sbrault74]

In this case, would you change the date to post it as "new" content? Because even if I rewrite it, I can't post an article from 2008 to the website's Facebook page.

[Mike_Davis]

I think that it all depends on how bad the content is.  If you have content that is complete and total crap (10+ instances of the same keyword, reads like a toddler wrote it, etc.), it is better just to kill it and redirect your pages elsewhere.  On the other hand, if the content is salvageable, then take the time to re-write it and make it good.  The benefit of this is that at the end of the day you have good content instead of a bunch of links re-directed to pages that don't necessarily have anything to do with the old content.

Good luck!

P.S. Don't forget the disavow tool if you need it!

[Mike_Davis]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with multiple 301's pointing to the same page.

[sbrault74]

What if I have two dated articles that I merge into one updated article. Does it matter if I have two 301 redirects to the same URL?

[sbrault74]

with a 301 redirect? that's gonna be a huge htaccess file

[jesse-landry]

Kill it and redirect if there are any backlinks incoming. Definitely.