Good ideas, Dave.  Your housecleaning ideas prompted us to delete 2,500 old skin care product pages that we had converted to static pages after switching off Drupal.  It constituted 1% of our pages and visitors, but the poor metrics from those pages could have acted as a bad signal (2,500 pages is a lot for a human to create) and tarnished our overall site.  1% rotten is still too much.

Good idea about bringing back more content onto the Category/Subject pages.  We're going to do the same for our main landing pages.  The data I've seen indicates site speed seems is only used to break ties between pages with a similar ranking.

• Eric (CTO at RealSelf.com)