Archive older, low ranked content to help new content in Panda 2.2?

[EricPacifico]

After watching the white board friday re: Panda 2.2, it got me to thinking about old content.

One of the sites that I work with generates 3-10 new articles/day (movie reviews, interviews, guides, event previews, etc) and has been doing so since 2005. Now, they have almost 10k articles, 7k of which are indexed.

The quality of the content varies, and much of it is dated (movies, events) much of the amount of older content gets 0-5 pageviews/month, made in the days BEFORE the site was using Google News + social tools to spread the word (and backlinks). Note that those older articles also of course tend to have 100% bounce, and small/zero TOS.

Is this hurting the site? With 75-100 articles/month being published, I want to make sure they get maximum exposure. I'm also concerned that crawlers get sucked into the site chasing down old BS content, and that is hurting it as well.

What to do with this content? Should I unpublish unpopular, dated content and get it off the internet? Or, do I leave it on, but NOINDEX it so Google won't crawl it?

[EricPacifico]

Thanks for the reply! It's definitely tough to kill content (especially when you paid a writer to do an interesting story or event coverage). So using your suggestion, I looked at a minor section, thats new, but has suffered over the past 30 days.

130 articles 
73% bounce
73% exit
1m TOS
26k pageviews
of those, 35 articles have 100% bounce rate, under 10 pageviews, under 1min TOS. I assume applying a simple metric such as this, site wide, and unpublishing articles that fall under this category, would help clear the brush away from the newer content?

[brycebertola]

It always hurts to trim existing content, but I think it probably needs to be done.

Google is making a lot of changes to improve the user experience, and if your site is delivering a lot of bounced visitors then google might view it as a poor user experience.