Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?

[ElBo913]

While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?

[ElBo913]

Thanks for the insight everyone!

I was also thinking about the possibility of canonicalizing them to pages on the ecommerce site, but am afraid that might have the same detrimental effect as redirecting them.

@Nakul and Todd: The content is not horrible, but they are basically set up as blog rolls. I don't think anyone particularly "likes" the content nor do they share it. For the most part, they are product reviews and announcements from our manufacturers, and I have stopped adding content to the sites because it seemed like a waste, when I could be generating new and better content for the actual e-commerce site and our real blog. That said, there is a tremendous amount of content on these sites from the last 4 years. It was apparently working very well for the company, but not after panda and penguin. Some of the domains are exact matches for our head keywords (that we lost rankings for), others are exact matches for product titles or model numbers. I don't think there was ever an unnatural links warning from Google, but I've seen sites not get a message in GWT but still clearly be penalized for it.

@Moosa: Both. Failed in terms of not generating conversions (or possibly generating a few here and there), but relative to the likely negative effect, I'm just not sure how to handle this. They are our sites, so dissavowing them wouldn't do much good. I could go through and manually remove links and canonicalize them, but I'm wondering if it's better to just take the sites down...

[MoosaHemani]

Now when you say failed micro sites, does that means failed in terms of content or converting users in to customers or failed because they have spammy links on their profile and because they get a hit from panda or penguin?

If they get a hit from panda or penguin then it is the worst idea to redirect the micro site to main site as they will pass their link juices to the main site (which makes the situation go worst)!

In-case they are failed it terms of gaining SERP rankings and converting users in to customers in that case you can redirect it to main site...

If redirection is the only option you have then in that case try to clean their link profile by sending link removal emails and using a link disavow tool and then move towards redirection.

Hope this helps!

[toddmumford]

I agree with Nakul - if they do not have great content and great inbound natural links, they can potentially do harm to your main website.

It is worth extensively evaluating the situation before proceeding.

[NakulGoyal]

Do they have great content ? Do people like the content ? Do actual users share or interact with your content ? Is it ideation of your e-commerce products ? Or is it more like information about your products ? Does it add value to your customer ? How much content do you have on your microsites ? Are they same/similar topics ?

It depends case to case, but you could indeed consider doing what you are thinking based on the answers above. Just make sure it adds value.

Also, have you ever received a penalty or unnatural links warning ?