Will massive "sculpting" make a difference?

[seo_plus]

I'm working with a very popular blog that also is associated with related products we manufacture and sell ourselves.

The blog is about 99% blog content and about 1% product content.

If suddenly some 99% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 1%?

Also, be aware that this blog has lots of high quality backlinks from everyday recognizable magazines, newspapers and blogs.   Of course, this is a highly competitive market place so I'm trying to leave no-stone-unturned here in working out the kinks.

In the old days, we sort-of-called this "pagerank sculpting" and the idea was to focus the linkjuce on certain pages and defocus it on other pages.  It made sense to block certain pages that were not indexible but Google supposedly dinged that tactic years ago, and today people say this is act also helps as it conserves the crawl budget.

Might this make a difference these days??

Keep in mind that the 4,950 remaining pages are still followed, and all backlinks remain in place.

Will the site start ranking better for the keywords on the 50 indexed (product) pages?

[vcj]

Noindex + follow on your low quality pages will just allow your crawl budget to potentially be better spent on the content that you want Google to crawl and index. It's not going to boost the value of pages that are already indexed.

So if you have quality pages and product pages that Google isn't seeing due to wasted crawl budget and low quality pages, then noindexing them might be a strategy to consider. I'd also make sure the quality of the pages you want to have indexed is unique and of high quality.

[EGOL]

And reading between the lines, my guess is you are saying yes, this matters a great deal - elsewise you wouldn't want to be advising lots of analysis before action.  Am i right?

You are right.

At a high level, would blocking that old stuff (no index, yes follow) effectively refocus linkjuce on product pages?

I believe that linkjuice will still flow through these pages.  Is that correct?  Maybe, it depends upon how search engines have decided to process the flow of linkjuice through noindexed pages that are followed... and search engines can decide however they want and change their minds about it without announcement or regard.

So the question remains: will selectively noindexing large quantities of old poor-quality stuff help the relatively smaller quantities of product related stuff in Google's ranking algorhitm?

I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know how search engines handle the noindex.  If this was my site, I would be redirecting to remove those pages from the index and push the value of any links to a relevant page on the website - if there is one.

Here is what I have done on a similar situation....

One one of my sites we were posting about six to ten very short news items per day.  This was a news blog that covered emerging topics in our industry and related industries.  They would get a lot of traffic  for a few days and a few of them would attract a nice amount of traffic long term.  We would allow them to remain in the blog archive until the first day of January, two years after they were posted.  We would then redirect all of them as a group to the homepage of the news section of the website and delete them from the server.  Before the redirect was done we would consider any of the posts that were still drawing traffic and write extended articles for those that were of merit.

We continue the news blog because.... lots of other industry related websites link to the homepage of the news section, lots of people have it book marked, it ranks well in search and gets thousands of views per day.

But the main reason we keep it...  lots of visitors type our domain into the address window of their broswer or into a search box, land on our homepage and click "news".   Google sees this activity because they are the most important search engine and they own the most important browser.  Google sees thousands of people asking for our website by name.  That in my opinion, is extremely important to the rankings of my website that people ask for us by name and Google sees it.  So, if you have this it could be worth more than gold.

[seo_plus]

Indeed, that is what I do - however the question remains.

And reading between the lines, my guess is you are saying yes, this matters a great deal - elsewise you wouldn't want to be advising lots of analysis before action.  Am i right?

So - here's some more details of the scenario:

Imagine a news related blog that was very popular and contained years worth of commentary that is about 99% non-product related, with zero useful internal links to products other than through menus and footers.

This 99% tends to be non-quality oriented pages - sure there's traffic due to the volume of pages but it does not convert, nor do people look at products when visiting the blog pages - and there is no question that the older stuff draws way less traffic than newer stuff.

Because there is so much of it, i can generally infer what the keywords are that are being used and they are not presently - nor will they ever be - useful within the broader product strategy of the site.  Ads on those pages are also highly non-productive.

At a high level, would blocking that old stuff (no index, yes follow) effectively refocus linkjuce on product pages?

As an example, if this stuff went back 10 years, I might think about selectively blocking the oldest nine, with of course special attention to not block certain pages if any of them were ever-green, super linked, stood out for super-high engagement etc.

So the question remains: will selectively noindexing large quantities of old poor-quality stuff help the relatively smaller quantities of product related stuff in Google's ranking algorhitm?

[vcj]

Great answer. EGOL is correct in that you need to consider the performance of the pages you're considering no-indexing.

If this is a popular blog, it seems a reasonable assumption is that the content quality is good. Generally speaking, you don't want to noindex quality content that's driving traffic to your site.

I suspect a noindex strategy on 99% of content for a popular blog is a bad one. But as EGOL pointed out, it's impossible to say for sure without fully understanding your website and its metrics.

[EGOL]

This is a very important question and you don't want to steer this decision using "shoot from the hip" answers or kibitzing.

I believe that a good answer to this question would require a person to become very very familiar with these 5000 blog posts, the links that flow into them, the amounts of traffic that they receive, their content quality and their search engine health.

If suddenly some 99% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 1%?

This is an extremely drastic move.  There might be better ways to accomplish your goal of using the power of these pages to drive linkjuice.  However, linkjuice is not the single factor here.  Traffic, navigation structure, keyword reach of the site and many other things could be more important.

I don't want to give any specific advice because a well considered answer is what you need and I am unable to provide it.  I don't think that anyone can given the information provided and without being extremely familiar with your website.

When I have made this type of decision with my own site (that I know extremely well from working on it every day for many years) I usually study on it for weeks, looking at traffic, conversions, content investment and more, then obtained second opinions to give me strength or weakness about making the move.

This is not a decision that is easy to make.  Quick answers given here are going to come with risks.