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Thanks, this is very helpful. I love the idea of having the new blogger write posts about the same topics thereby getting some much more engaging content at the URLs that already have traffic coming in.

tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog?

We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good.

So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be  safely removed.

So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?

I had a site tank in January 2012. Non-branded search traffic was down almost 50% that month (the previous 6 months had all been very steady at the higher traffic level) and that has remained ever since.

I did some analysis in Analytics and found the unique keywords driving traffic went down from around 3,800 to 950. Our big keywords and rankings remained and actually got stronger but the long-tail traffic almost completely disappeared.

This type of scenario seems in line with Panda rather than Penguin as other commenters have noted. What would be the best way to address a situation like that?

Thanks for your response! Do you know if there is specific info on how OSE incorporates the social signals into PA? I am wondering how DA would directly influence PA if there are no internal links to the page. Theoretically the page should have a PA of 0 regardless of the DA if there are no links pointing to the page anywhere on the web with the exception of social mentions.

Thanks,

Evan

I've looked through the Open Site Explorer documentation and can't find the answer so am posting here...

I noticed a web page I work on showing a PA 30 but OSE is showing 0 links from 0 root domains. It is a page that has no internal links to it and no external links to it (that I know of) but has stumbles, tweets, and Diggs. Are these social factors the reason it has a PA of more than 0 or 1? If so, is there a link to documentation that shows how OSE handles social signals?

Thanks,

Evan