We put out at least a thousand very short news blurbs per year.  These are mostly for events that have almost no value to visitors a few months later. (Visitors bounce off hard)

About once a year we run analytics on these pages to find out which ones are pulling traffic.  This traffic is usually related to the topic but not to the out-of-date event.  Where we have nice traffic coming in we look for a similar current topic, write a short story and redirect the old URL to the new one.

Any pages that do not have nice  traffic are deleted and redirected to the blog homepage.  Some of these deleted pages have links so that value is passed to the homepage - which faces competition.

In my opinion, having lots of pages on your site that are not pulling in traffic and have no value to visitors is like dead weight.  You will ride higher in the water and sail faster if you toss them overboard.

If you move the content and redirect the pages then you get new pages into the SERPs and get the value of redirected links.

What you don't get are things like brand mentions, domain type-ins, navigational domain queries, visitor behavior, SERP CTR, and more.  The more mature the website the more valuable these other assets might be.  Some of these assets will evaporate with the move, some will be reset to zero and others might be inherited.

All you can hope for is to do what you can to conserve these things.

Take a look at the person's previous work.   Does it get published, mentioned or linked to on extremely high quality websites - websites that everyone has heard of?  Is it interesting, helpful, hilarious, provocative?   Does it get shared?  Does it rank?  Is this person visible, known and respected throughout your industry?   Does their writing generate a lot of immediate attention and traffic when it is published on their own website?  How much would it be worth to you to have an article from this person on your website?

If their work  is published on your website do you think your visitors will respond well to it and spontaneously share it with their tribes?  If the answer to the above is "yes" then this person might not realize the value of their work and be crazy for selling it for $180 per hour.

My personal opinion is that many of the best authors don't sell their work.  They publish much of it on their own website and give the rest away without charge to websites that are valuable for "getting their message out" or helping other people.  Much of the quality content published on the moz blog fits this pattern.

(Personal opinion, I would not give a great author a wordcount.  I would want then to write what is needed to do a great job.)

**Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference? **

The brand?   Yes, if people know you.

Really, I would not change domains for the tiny advantage that you think a keyword in the domain might bring.  It is very possible that you will lose more linkjuice in the redirect than you will gain from the keyword in the domain.

Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?

heh... That crappy old site is beating you because they are beating you. 

It is easier to beat an old crappy site with "work" than it is to beat them with "tricks'.

I think that a lot of articles can be written without a date if they are content that is close to being totally evergreen.   If you add a date to these articles and that date is a few years old, it can tarnish the opinion of the visitor when there is nothing wrong with the article, and the article might even be among the very best on the web.  So, I don't date a lot of my articles for that reason.

I am always upgrading articles, which is different from updating.  An update is when you add fresh news or information that is totally new about the subject.  An upgrade is when you add another section of evergreen content, add new photos, improve photos, add a video,  do a rewrite for clarity, or other type of improvement.  I notice that when I upgrade an article it often moves higher in the SERPs.  Usually just a few positions if it is on the first page, but if it is deep in the SERPs, it might move up substantially.  I've never had anything move from bottom of first page to #1, unless it moved into the featured snippet.

If you have a website with a few thousand articles and your author team is two or three people, if each of them update or upgrade one article every working day, there will be articles on your site that go a long time without an update.  Figure 200 working days in a year and a three person team.... if you have a 6000 article website that means it will take ten years to upgrade or update every article - if you do them in a straight rotation.

If I had a site like that I would eliminate the individual ad pages and have much longer-tail ad categories.  Then the category pages would each have multiple ads, most recent at the top, and expiring ads at the bottom.

That puts much more substantive content on every page of the site, more potential keyword matches per page, more ranking power per page.

Go into your analytics and see if they are pulling any traffic from search.  See if they are pulling in any traffic from referrals or social media.

I am willing to bet that those pages are dead weight.

This types of pages do not exist on any of my sites.

So, if you find in the analytics that these pages are dead weight then delete them and use 301 redirects, and turn them off in your content manager.

If you have content that you want to promote or that lots of people are lookin' at, then give those pages links in obvious locations on every page of your website.   People will look at that... they will rarely click a tag.

We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews.

OK... same crappy product getting no authentic reviews.  Suddenly a ton a reviews appear on "authoritative" websites.  Somebody did something to make that happen.

So Google has real people just combing the web for these types of cases? No algo?

They have a really simple algo that catches this stuff.

Just sayin'....

Some hosts who offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited other stuff often find ways to throttle your success by limiting your number of database connections, users online or some other BS metric.

Not sayin' that is what is happening to you here but sayin' that I learned my lesson to host my websites where they are going to charge me for all of the resources that I use.  That way they win when I succeed and not they become defensive when I succeed.

Call 'em up and ask them what's going on?  Bug them.  Tell them that you want a reason why it is so slow.

You work hard to make your site a success.  Don't settle for poor hosting.