Transferring old articles to new site even if they are written horribly

[PrintPlace.com]

OK my question for today is...

If you currently have 300 articles on your current site but are building a new site would you transfer all of the articles over to the new site or focus on quality and rewrite the articles that had traffic? For example we have about 300 articles currently on our website 60 of which actually get traffic, We rewrote those articles to make sure they were written well. Someone thought that it would be best to simply transfer the other 240 articles over and rewrite them at another time to avoid 404 redirects. I would like your feedback on how you would approach this. Please be as detailed as possible explaining your thought process.

Thanks!

[Everett]

I would do the following:

• Redirect every URL from the old site to the appropriate page on the new site.

• Rewrite any content that is below standards prior to moving it over to the new site.

The old idea of having more pages meaning more internal pagerank, etc.. went out the window years ago with the Panda update.

[David-Kley]

In the end, it will be best to have all of the pages redirect. You will have a higher page count, more internal links, better overall site authority, and more chances to rank for more queries.

The first thing I would do is see what traffic the poorly-written articles have, and if it makes sense to rewrite them. Not sure what you mean by poorly written, is that an opinionated view, or is there data and feedback stating the articles are bad? If they have zero visitors over a 3 month span, I would see why.

Second, look at why the better written articles do so well. Is it the way they are written? The way the page visually is laid out? (prettier is better) Is the topic more heavily searched for? Did you share or market those posts or pages differently than the other ones? Spend a bit of time in analytics and webmaster tools to analyze some of the less-quality pages, and you might discover a trend.

If you choose to redirect, I would make sure to test all the redirects when you are done as Biron29 stated. The slightest variation in the URL will cause the redirect to fail. Screaming Frog seo spider is a great resource for testing for 404 errors, and its free up to a certain number of URLs.

[biron29]

Well in my mind the first step would be to have a really solid 301 redirect strategy. Moz has a great article here regarding redirects. I say this because the slightest name change or location change can cause a 404 error.  Secondly I would focus first on the content that is most valuable to carry over first. Thirdly and lastly  I would go through and evaluate the quality and relevance of the articles not receiving traffic and find out why. Then you can adjust to take calculated steps to generate traffic for these articles as well. So that long description was to say yes I would carry all the content over use your 301 redirects and canonical urls and adjust the content as needed to increase its value. Hope this helps!