If you have a kickass price, SHOUT it in the <title>tag.</p></title>

A long-time military strategy has been "divide and conquer".

The same holds true for a website.  The strength of one part of the website supports the strength of other parts of a website.

If you remove one part, the remaining part will take a hit if the part that was removed had valuable links.  The part that was removed will not perform as well as it was partially supported the the strength of the rest of the site.

I'd like to spin off a couple parts of my site - and I have good business reasons for doing that.  However, I know that I will suffer traffic hits and income hits.   I will also suffer visibility hits because one part of the site promotes other parts of the site, and lots of my visitors click back and forth through these different parts of the website.

So, instead of being happy about having a bunch of tidy little sites, I am sticking with the big site because it kicks ass.

Hello mattl99!

You are really fortunate.  You got two 10x responses from Roman and Bob.

I'll add just a little...  about.... Your visitors and your niche...

If you are selling very simple and common items that everybody uses and knows about then you don't need to write a huge description - just explain the specs.  But, if you are writing about things that involve effort, knowledge and creativity of your visitors to purchase, then you need a lot more than specs.  Items for do-it-yourself projects, items for craft/hobby projects, or the tools, parts and accessories needed for complex goods.  These require a lot more effort and the visitors both need and expect your expertise to help them decide, purchase, use and enjoy.

If you want good responses to this question, then post more about these pages (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, purpose of pages, etc.) and more about your site (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, etc.).

Questions with little information are often ignored by people who might know a lot about the  subject because they don't want to guess, they don't want to think about and write about all possible cases, put their effort into a question when the poster didn't put much of his own effort into explaining.

Also, who are you?  Owner?  Employee?  SEO?  Are you the guy who put these pages up and didn't put any content on them?  The guy who paid for the skinny content that is currently up there and needs to have input on yanking them down or paying for proper content?

MapQuest was the kickass leader in online mapping in the 1990s.  They took first place right out of the gate.  Then, AOL made a deal to purchase MapQuest for a Billion Dollars in 1999.  It was one of the first billion dollar website deals.

Their SEO performance has been up and down, with good optimization being taken down and crappy put back in its place.  They have done that a couple of times.

Interesting articles (in addition to a good summary on Wikipedia...

https://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/2068.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/does-mapquest-still-exist-as-a-matter-of-fact-it-does/2015/05/22/995d2532-fa5d-11e4-a13c-193b1241d51a_story.html

We can look at almost any SERP and see people doing things that we don't like, things that we think that Google should be slapping down.  Sometimes what they are doing is directly against Google's terms of service.  Sometimes they are not against terms of service and Google really doesn't care.  Is expired domains against Google's webmaster guidelines?  I don't think that it is.  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

You can use them too if you want, but I would not use them because I don't think that they are a good bet.  I think that my skills are better spent on building something right from the beginning and working long term.

Crime?  Not crime?  Either way, inside and outside of Google people get away with things all the time, but if they do enough crime or sneaky stuff or shortcuts, things usually fall apart on them or they get caught.  I can look back at "who was in my SERPs" over 15 years and about every five years there is almost a complete changeover - but the people working to make a great site remain and get stronger.  Crime and sneaky stuff gets weeded out.  Some sites that used to be good get weeded out because they take their foot off the gas or start taking shortcuts.

If these things bother you, then you are probably doing your best to run a good site.  So just keep working, doing a high quality  job.  Spend 100% of your energy there and waste no energy thinking about people getting away with stuff, because, in the not very distant future, people doing the sneaking, the crime, the shortcuts will drop to below competitive positions, if they do not disappear completely.   Hang in there!

That's the way a lot of people have their responsiveness configured.  There are many who drop the sidebar.  Others move elements of the sidebar into the content to make the options visible higher in the page.

When I hear the word "sidebar" these days, I think of a desktop site.   I don't think of "sidebars" on a mobile site.

If you are talking "desktop" and you have a mobile version of your site, does that sidebar appear in any format on the mobile site?   If not, your sidebar will not be an SEO consideration once Google and your site move to the mobile index.  At that time you will lose any SEO benefit (or curse) that the sidebar added to the desktop version of your website.

This is the issue about the mobile first index that very few people are talking about and a lot of people havn't even thought about.

I believe that you can get rid of tags and archives in most situations.  However, good use can often be made of categories, author and pagination.

Let's imagine that you have a website or a blog (there is no difference) about "Widgets".  Every time you find a new widget you photograph it and write a post with substantive content about it.  You are a widget expert and know an awful lot about them.  Widgets are a popular collectable and lots of people are interested in them.  So you start your blog (or website) and publish posts (or pages) about two or three different widgets every week.

You realize that there are different types of widgets based upon what they are made from and everybody knows about this.  Lots of people search for wooden widgets, brass widgets, copper widgets, plastic widgets,etc.  So you make these the categories of your blog (or website) and all of the post about wooden widgets are posted to the "wooden widgets" category page.  Same for "copper widgets" and "brass widgets" etc.

Your post pages display the full size photo and everything that you had to say about that widget.  Your category pages display a small photo of the widget and the first paragraph of your article.  Soon, you have posts about 10 brass widgets, 12 wooden widgets, and 22 plastic widgets and those category pages are starting to look healthy.  They might start ranking for in the SERPs for keywords like "plastic widgets" and "brass widgets" and pull in more traffic than all of your posts combined.

After you have about 20 post showing on a category page you might start using pagination to keep that category page from being enormous.  Then when people read to the bottom they see a link for "earlier posts" and click it.  That takes them to the older posts for this topic and you get more ad impressions.  Now the pagination pages have become valuable.

Your author page might have some bio information about you, noting that you are the president of the Ohio Widget Collecting Society and are a professor of design at a college, where you teach a course on the History of Widgets in America.   You can construct the author page to display your bio and credentials information at the top, your most recent ten posts below that, and your most popular posts below that.  Author pages are valuable because people want to know about you.  Google wants to know about you too because they want to determine if you are a credible author for "widgets".

From experience I can say that category pages can pull in a LOT of traffic, and a REALLY LOT of traffic if you rank well and the topic of your page is heavily searched.  Your author page can help people to decide to link to you, invite you to speak at a convention, ask you to teach a course at a local university, Google might use information from your author page to decide that you deserve better rankings than other authors who post prattle about widgets.  And, your pagination pages can make a lot of extra ad impressions.

So, carefully consider the potential category pages that fit your blog, try to find keywords that are logical fits, optimize those pages to rank for heavily searched queries.  Wordpress gave you lots of options.  Decide how you can use them in a planned way for visitors, searchers, and your own goals.

Good luck.

I recently answered a similar question here....

https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-handle-annual-content-2018-2019